Last night on ESPN there was this huge debate as to whether baseball or football is a better sport. The debate was rather easily won by Buck Showalter and was seconded by Dave Winfield, who are both of course, baseball guys.   But it brings up a point about how much hype and propaganda goes into promoting various sports in America.  Take for example the claim that NFL football is the most popular televised sport in America.  This is in fact false. If one is judging the issue on individual size of audience for individual games, the comparison is invalid. 

NFL football involves only 16 regular season games. IBaseball however involves 162 regular season games. For a valid comparison you would have to take the TV ratings of NFL football and MLB baseball per week, not per game.  In the NFL a team plays exactly one game in a week, in the MLB usually about five.  Let’s take my Red Sox vs. my N.E. Patroits, both good teams that sell out their stadiums and have done so the last few years in a row.  And indeed they are both on some TV network every week they play.  For a fair comparison you would need to add up the TV ratings of all five games the Red Sox played in a week, and compare that to the audience drawn by one N.E. Patriots game.  Bottom line, both live and on TV far more people watched that baseball team in a week than watched that football team. 

Suppose then we compare Division One college basketball to NFL football.  Again, a college basketball team, let’s say my Tar Heels, will play 2-3 games a week, whereas my Carolina Panthers will once more play one game a week.   Both in terms of the cumulative TV ratings for the week, and the number of people who actually watched these two teams this week—- it is no contest.  College basketball wins hands down in terms of viewing audience, and I might add in terms of fan loyalty to the team.

Why then is it that we hear the propaganda over and over again from ESPN about NFL football?  Well of course because they like it.  Indeed, they like it so much that they talk about it ad nauseum, indeed as much in the off season as they do about other sports which are in season!  I mean seriously do we need 3 days worth of coverage of the NFL draft!  I feel like going into an Allen Iverson-like rant about practice.   Don’t misunderstand me, I do enjoy watching both college football and pro football.  Its just down the depth chart for me compared to things like college basketball and pro baseball.  Shoot, I’d rather watch a great Masters tournament than a week’s worth of mediocre or bad NFL games.   

And this leads to a further question— why exactly are we glorifying the most violent of all major sports (except perhaps boxing and its clones), where hitting has replaced tackling, and ambulances are waiting next to every stadium at every game?   I’m talking to you ESPN.  I have done an earlier post about sportsmanship dying in American sports, and frankly ESPN has not helped, by glorifying big hits that injure people, over covering bad behavior of players, and so on. It has contributed to the coarsening of our culture, in this case our sports culture. 

Honestly, we are tired to hearing the stories about athletes with feet of clay who should not have been put up on pedestals in the first place,  much less the thugs on drugs who play major sports.    So how about we cover mainly sports that are actually in season, and also promote better sportsmanship in all sports, college or professional?  How about we dial down the rhetoric about gargantuan salaries and massive bad behavior? 

I am at this very minute watching Sports Center, and what do we see— the NHL playoffs where in fact there is coverage of championship wrestling breaking out on ice and high sticking hits are covered in extenso….. I thought this was supposed to be about actually playing hockey, not that other garbage.  I hope you’re listening ESPN. You are, whether intentionally or not, glamorizing bad behavior, when it should mostly be ignored, not glorified.