… on a subject I don’t know much of anything about:
I think that all sports teams that are affiliated with a particular geographic region (city, etc.) should be required to only be made up of members of that particular region, who have lived there for like 10-15 years. I just think it would be interesting that way. Right now when you’re rooting for an LA (or wherever) team, all you’re really rooting for is a business that’s based out of LA.
18 Comments
Good idea. I like it. Why don’t you start lobbying for that?
But then teams like the New England Patriots would have the whole east coast from which to choose their players. Not very fair then.
I think they would need to define the boundaries so there wouldn’t be any overlap.
Within a certain milage of their stadium/or the boundaries of their state, which ever is bigger.
Then Canada wouldn’t have a very good team at all. And City’s in the mid west would have to cut a lot of good players that normally would easily play.
I don’t like it.
Reminds me of why I don’t like *some* of the equal opportunity legislation because great people are being overlooked because of circumstances they can’t help.
circumstances they can’t help like being poor?
This was really more of a joke post than anything else, but I think if they really wanted to make it fair they could easily define non-overlapping boundaries with pretty much even population distributions in them, which would be perfectly fair.
Like I said before, the idea would be that then you would be cheering for a particular city’s team and it would actually be that city’s players you are cheering for. Kind of like in a school game, how all the players on the team are from that school.
It’s no big deal really, since I don’t really care about sports at all, but it just seems kind of dumb to me that people have these loyalties to the sports teams of a particular city when the teams themselves don’t really have anything to do with the city, other than being based there (temporarily for many players).
I gotta agree with you on this one! Scarry, huh?!
you could always just stick with high school and college sports. yeah yeah, i know you don’t care about sports, i’m just sayin’.
I think professional athletes are too overpaid anyway. Bring on the college hoops and football any time!
College is the same as the pros.
Jared: Even with population limitations it still would not work. I read an article in ESPN magazine years back with a map of the US with all professional sports players represented over x amount of years and there are areas that just create a lot of good players in all sports. California regions would hypothetically have all-star teams that would have to cut guys/gals that would be a starter in Minnesota.
It would be cool though. That’s why I guess the Olympics are so great and individual sports like golf, Tennis doesn’t count.
NaS: yeah, either way someone is getting screwed.
Re: certain areas having better players - I’d rather see that than the teams with the most money having the best players.
Even colleges do stuff like recruiting, which still kind of takes away from any sense of “hometown” fans, for me.
The teams with the most money are the teams in largest markets, like New York and L.A. For most pro sports, with the exception of at least MLB, salary caps are used to keep teams competitive despite revenue inequities. As I understand it, MLB doesn’t have a salary cap because the players union is really strong and they don’t want one but you can see compared to say the NFL or NBA that small market teams like Kansas City don’t have great chances being great teams. Sports with salary caps, on the other hand, keep the teams pretty competitive.
Why doesn’t tennis count? Are you just trying to get a rise out of me?
yeah.
I thought you were just saying tennis and golf since those aren’t team competitions, so it doesn’t matter.
Tennis is in the olympics! I agree with JB on this topic. When I was a kid I always thought the teams were made of people from that city or at least state. I was a bit disappointed when I found out they weren’t. Of coarse that was only a three years ago- just kidding!