OPINION:
I spent some of last week at the beach and in the ocean enjoying the waning days of summer. For many, the end of summer is a wistful moment to reflect on the passage of time, curate memories and wrestle, once again, with one’s own mortality.
For the rest of us, however, the end of summer means more important things are afoot — namely, pennant races in baseball and the start of football. Baseball fans, especially Yankees fans, prepare once again to be disappointed by their team’s failure to win the World Series. When the Yanks fail (again) this year, it will mark 16 years since their last World Series victory, the longest such stretch since the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to New York in 1920.
Let’s be honest: Baseball isn’t the same without the Yankees dominating the league every once in a while. It feels like a disturbance in the alignment of the cosmos.
In the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys are heading toward another disappointing year. In the 30 years since their last Super Bowl appearance, “America’s Team” has been a dud, winning just five playoff games across three decades.
I mention the Yankees and the Cowboys because they are similar franchises. They have for some time lived off previous glories with fan bases so tangled in nostalgia that they are incapable of looking squarely at the world and seeing the owners of the teams for what they are: profit maximizers interested in winning only to the extent that it allows them to continue to charge confiscatory prices for the mediocre product they put on the field.
Take the Cowboys, for instance. Immediately before the first game of this season, the team’s owner traded perhaps the best defensive player in the NFL to Green Bay for a handful of middling players. He did this not out of spite or out of anger; he did it because it made the most economic sense for him. Jerry Jones’ sole metric in assessing his team performance is not championships but rather the value of the franchise.
If there is any doubt about that, Mr. Jones went on “Good Morning America” to justify the trade. Why GMA? Because he knows that all exposure is good, and it is unlikely that the GMA hostesses would grill him on the wisdom of the trade. Indeed, on GMA he justified the trade by noting that he received four players in exchange for just one. Team GMA failed to point out that the players in question are not, in fact, interchangeable widgets; four are not necessarily better than one.
Mr. Jones is also enabled by the NFL media ecosystem. Dozens of TV and radio shows dedicate most of their programming to the Cowboys, no matter how badly the team plays. The simple reality is that the audience seems to want the soap opera more than the sport.
That also explains why Taylor Swift started lurking around the NFL a few years back. She sensed that professional football had become less of a sport and more of a show involving good guys, bad guys and plotlines. When the TV cameras found her, a significant chunk of the fan base was excited that a pop star was validating their decision to spend time and cash on the narrative that is football.
Fans — especially fans of franchises that used to be successful on the field, such as the Cowboys and the Yankees — spend a lot of time complaining to one another about the team, the coaches, whatever. However, when the franchise is making money and the stands are filled and TV and radio stations are making money, why would the owners change anything? They bought the franchises to make money, not to win championships. If the fans are going to be irrational and spend money against their own interests, whose fault is that?
If you don’t like what “your” team is doing or how it’s are performing, the simple remedy is to turn off the TV, cancel your subscription to the streaming services and find something useful to do on the weekends. Maybe spend more time at the beach.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times. He misses George Steinbrenner.
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