Dave Meltzer stuff

[Bix]

The pharmacy business is the same thing as pro wrestling.

 

- The goal is to make money. OK, it's business first, caring for customers second, keeping proper records second, I don't know, but it's all the same thing, but at the end whether it's sport or entertainment, it is number one a business and if you think it's anything but a business and you're running it, you'll be out of business, that's a reality and anyone who doesn't understand that, doesn't understand the first thing about this industry.

- Like pro wrestling, pharmacies are filled with dangerous narcotics.

- Like pro wrestlers, pharmaceuticals are regularly repackaged to make more money.

- Pharmacy techs are to pharmacists as Hollywood writers are to wrestling bookers.

- Pharmacists giving flu shots is not unlike WWE expanding its profit streams with merchandise, video on demand, etc.

- Various pharmacy chains have expanded nationally, taking over some local pharmacies and driving others out of business, just like the WWF did with the other territories.

- Wal-Mart has exclusives in many towns, similar to the arena wars between the WWF and WCW.

- Pharmacist and pro wrestler are both jobs that requiring expensive schooling.

- Like wrestlers in some states, pharmacists have to be licensed.

- Pharmacies have programs in place to make sure that counterfeit medications don't get into stores. WWE works with MarkMonitor to fight merchandise counterfeiters. Pro wrestling as a whole also has Kendall Windham.

- Like some TNA wrestlers, as well as Shane Douglas and Justin Credible, pharmacists work in retail stores.

- Pharmacies have magazine sections and usually carry at least one wrestling magazine. Some carry WWE and/or TNA action figures.

- Many supermarkets have pharmacies. Thanksgiving has generated a lot of money for both grocery stores and pro wrestling. Also, Steve Austin once beat up Booker T in a supermarket and JAPW ran shows in a converted A&P.

- Joe Malenko is a licensed pharmacist.

- Many pro wrestlers who dealt drugs have been referred to as pharmacists. They are to backyard wrestlers as pharmacists are to pro wrestlers.

- Like customers of pharmacies, wrestlers like Ric Flair walk the aisles.

- Some pharmacists work to develop future medications similar to how some wrestlers develop future stars in FCW.

- Some wrestlers take niacin and/or aspirin before blading. Both were probably purchased from a pharmacy.

- As with UFC Heavyweight Champions, the majority of customers of certain pharmacies are also pro wrestlers. That's no coincidence.

[Cox]

Wow. I was only joking about Antoine Dodson being pro wrestling, but I'm pretty sure Dave might actually believe that.

[kjh]

I think Dave is slowly losing his mind in the Fitch thread:

 

I was just out tonight with some friends from Stanford. they were talking about that if they'd have lost tonight and gone 10-2, they wouldn't go to a Bowl Game even though 8-4 teams go because aside from the top Bowls, the rest of the Bowls now pick on which team "travels best" (can bring alumni into town and buy a lot of tickets and spend a lot of money). Now they'll be high enough in the rankings that they can go to a major bowl even with the drawback of having the rep of not "traveling well."

 

I didn't bother to ask if ESPN still covered college football since that was proof it wasn't a real sport, and if people were mistaking it for pro wrestling.

 

I know that when I worked in soccer in the office, our goal was keeping the team alive. That meant live attendance. Winning was important, but keeping the team alive was a whole lot more important then our won-loss record. If our goals were in the other direction, we'd be retarded and also out of business.

 

But saying all that must mean that somehow college football and the old NASL were run by wrestling people and it ruined their sport or something.

The soccer talking point is highly amusing given that the NASL has been dead for over 25 years and if he followed the world's most lucrative football league he'd realise how important winning is in that sport. A top English team fails to make the top four, they lose their Champions League revenue, slip further in the table, they miss out on the Europa cup, end up getting relegated, then there is a huge drop in their revenue next season. Just ask the once mighty Leeds United, Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham Forest, etc how having a terrible win loss record and ending up relegated worked out for their businesses.

[Cox]

Yeah, that is pretty much true in other sports as well. Other than maybe new stadiums (and even they have a shelf life of maybe 1-2 years at most these days), nothing draws better than winning, particularly sustained winning. Perhaps if the NASL had survived, he would have eventually learned this.

[S.L.L.]

Being only semi-knowledgeable about MMA myself, I'd like to approach this from a different angle for a moment.

 

UFC at one show last year offered specific bonuses to everyone who finishes. There were almost no finishes on that show. It was amazing.

Yeah, it's almost like the matches weren't pre-determined and both fighters were actually trying to win. You can throw around bonuses for entertaining fights all you want to, but realistically, who the hell is becoming an MMA fighter first and foremost for the money? A while back, my homeboy Victator interviewed Dan Severn, and in discussing the infamous Shamrock fight, Severn basically said that he regretted nothing because even if the fight bored people to tears, he was a competitor trying to win a competition, and this was his best attempt at doing so. And really, how am I supposed to fault him for that? Interviews and miscellaneous ballyhoo are one thing, but when you actually get in the octagon, is anyone really putting their body on the line like that just to cash a paycheck? If you're an MMA fighter, and your main goal is to make money, the first logical step to take is to stop being an MMA fighter, because there are way easier ways to do that. So if you don't just up and quit, I have to assume there's something else keeping you involved with the sport, and my best guess is that you love the game, love to play it, and want to be the best in the world at it.

 

Here's the upshot to all of this: the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts bans - amongst many other things - "timidity, including, without limitation, avoiding contact with an opponent, intentionally or consistently dropping the mouthpiece or faking an injury". In other words, the kind of stuff that made Severn/Shamrock unbearable is now illegal, and that seems to me like a far more effective approach from a business standpoint than to just offer bonuses for entertaining fights and hope against hope that your roster decides to go for the bonus instead of going for the win.

 

If an MMA fighter truly "got it" in the Meltzerian sense, and really cared about it on that level as much as Dave does, they'd stop being an MMA fighter. The reason they continue in the sport is because they're sportsmen. They're competitors in a game, and games are defined by their rules. If you really want competitors to change how they play the game, you change the rules.

 

And if you can't think of a good way to do that, and you really believe entertaining the crowd is more important than wins and losses, at least have the common sense to make the entertainment bonuses bigger than the winner's purse. No one ever convinced a boxer to throw a fight by offering them less money than they'd get if they won.

[jdw]

I think Dave is slowly losing his mind in the Fitch thread:

 

I was just out tonight with some friends from Stanford. they were talking about that if they'd have lost tonight and gone 10-2, they wouldn't go to a Bowl Game even though 8-4 teams go because aside from the top Bowls, the rest of the Bowls now pick on which team "travels best" (can bring alumni into town and buy a lot of tickets and spend a lot of money). Now they'll be high enough in the rankings that they can go to a major bowl even with the drawback of having the rep of not "traveling well."

I think we see why Dave is so off on his "sports" facts: his friends are fucking idiots.

 

The Pac 10 has locked in agreements with the following bowls *if* they have enough teams eligible to fill them (i.e. teams that win 6 qualified games):

 

PAC-10 No. 1: Rose Bowl (vs Big Ten No. 1)

PAC-10 No. 2: Alamo Bowl (vs. Big 12 No. 3)

PAC-10 No. 3: Holiday Bowl (vs. Big 12 No. 5)

PAC-10 No. 4: Sun Bowl (vs ACC No. 4)

PAC-10 No. 5: Maaco Bowl Las Vegas (vs. MWC No. 1)

PAC-10 No. 6: Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl (vs. WAC)

 

If Stanford lost, they would have been 7-2 in the Pac 10. Other than Oregon, every other Pac 10 team already had at least 3 losses as beating Stanford would have left OSU at 5-3 with Oregon on deck.

 

In other words, Stanford already had 2nd place in the Pac-10 clinched. Which means they were guaranteed going to the Alamo Bowl.

 

Reality check #1: the Pac 10 doesn't even have enough 6 win teams to fill all of those commitments. So there hasn't been any doubt that Stanford was going bowling back when they won their 6th game back in October.

 

Only Oregon (11-0 with a game left), Stanford (11-1), Arizona (7-4 with a game left) and USC (7-5 with a game left) have six wins in the Pac 10. ASU is 5-6 with Arizon left on the schedule, but ASU has two wins over Championship Subdivision teams, and only *one* of those can count towards your 6 wins, so ASU effectively only has "four" qualified wins. Yes, some dumbass in the ASU Athletic Department scheudled two Big Sky teams rather than one Big Sky team and say a Mountain West or WAC jobber. See... this is complicated stuff.

 

Reality check #2: Stanford was 8-4 last year... and went to the Sun Bowl as Pac 10 #4.

 

It's possible that Dave's Friends are as big of Fucking Idiots as Dave is making them come across as.

 

But it's far more likely that Dave just didn't get what they were trying to explain to him because he doesn't follow college football at all.

 

What they may have been trying to explain was that Stanford was at risk of being shutout of one of the four BSC Bowl games because they don't travel well.

 

That was correct, but *only* because the Rose Bowl was/is at risk of being forced to take TCU (and formerly Boise) because the Pac 10 #1 (Oregon) is headed towards the BSC Title Game. Normally the Rose Bowl would have the right to select a replacement, which it would use to take Stanford to come down I-5 to Pasadena. This is similar to the Sugar Bowl likely taking Arkansas to replace Auburn in the Sugar Bowl. But this is a year where it's the Rose Bowl's turn to eat the BCS Buster if they lose the Pac 10 Champ to the Title game. And since Stanford isn't a great traveling team, there was the risk that one of the other BSC Bowls (Sugar, Orange, Fiesta in addition to the Rose) wouldn't use one of the three remaining At-Large spots (4 - Boise/TCU) to select Stanford.

 

I know this is all a bit complicated even to college football fans, as it takes a full season of tracking all the possibilities for a hardcore college fan like myself to get it. Dave *isn't* a college football fan, doesn't follow it at all, and fakes his way through the comments above based on either idiot friends or not really understanding the complicated points they're trying to get across to him.

 

So...

 

Reality #3: Stanford was always going bowling after Oct 23 when they won their 6th game

 

Everyone who follows college football as closely as Dave follows Pro Wrestling and MMA knew that.

 

I tend to think this is an example of why we find "bullshit" in so many of the Non-Wrestling and Non-MMA analogies that Dave tries to draw in to support his points/arguments. Dave doesn't fully get those other worlds that he pulling in as support, and has to rely on the knowledge of others. At times, those others are just flat out wrong. At times, there's likely something lost in translation as Dave misses half their points. The end result is the utter trainwreck that Dave has above.

 

Reality #4: Bama travels great and draw TV ratings. They aren't getting one of the three open At-Large spots in BCS Bowls because they weren't *succesful* enough this year. 9-3 and 4th Place in the SEC West trumps "business".

 

Wash, rinse and repeat for Notre Dame, which isn't getting one of those three slots either due to going 7-5.

 

College Football is big business. It drives a lot of decisions. But teams need to be successful as well.

 

John

[KrisZ]

And Stanford still has a real good shot of making a BCS bowl game

[jdw]

If they finish Top 4, they get an automatic bid.

 

But looking around, there no longer are enough other teams to block out even a #5 Stanford. Looking at the At-Large, if Oregon & Auburn & TCU win out, it looks like this:

 

At-Large #1: TCU (automic)

At-Large #2: Big 10 #2 (likely OSU)

At-Large #3: SEC #2 (Arkansas to Sugar)

At-Large #4: ?

 

Conferences can only send two teams, so the third Big 10 one-loss team (Sparty) is shit outta luck, as would be a two-loss LSU from the SEC.

 

The ACC and Big East only will get their auto slots for their champs.

 

Which leaves the Pac 10, the Big 12 or Boise/Nevada.

 

Boise/Nevada isn't going to get a slot. If Boise had run the table and things broke elsewhere as they have, I suspect that what some other writers have said is correct: the BCS would have made a spot for both TCU and Boise. Leaving out a TCU at #4 would have been too risky to the Bowls and BCS to get away with. The Bowls don't want a playoff, and that would have made the calls for a playoff even stronger and more innevitable. Boise lost, so that's moot and they'll get bounced despite still being in the Top 10.

 

Which leaves the Big 12 and Pac 10.

 

Nebraska-OU in the Big 12 Championship will send one of them down to three-losses. Oklahoma State will be two-loss as will be Mizzou. Ok St will have lost to both OU and NE, so it's a hard sell. Mizzou is something of a sleeper, sitting 14th in the BCS *before* OK State's loss. But it's likely that neither Ok St nor Mizzou will finish comfortably in the Top 10.

 

There just isn't any way that if WI jumps Stanford for the #4 spot that the bowls would screw over a #5 Stanford for a two-loss Mizzou.

 

There's a delicate balance of getting all the conferences to agree to work together in the BCS, and to get the Bowls to work together. The Rose is already biting the bullet to take TCU rather than Stanford. If you turn around and screw Stanford and the Pac 10 out of a BCS payday (which Stanford shares with the conference), you've pissed off both the bowl that was the hardest to get to join the party (the Rose) and one of the two conferences that was the hardest as well (Pac 10 and Big 10). At a time when the Pac 10 and Big 10 have no love for the Big 12 and SEC. You have a lower ranked SEC team (Arkansas) and a lower ranked Big 12 (Mizzou) getting the big paydays.

 

Basically an invitation for war, at a time when there almost was war in the past off season.

 

The bowls get that, as to the conferences in general. TV does as well, and it's not like Mizzou is a TV draw, while Luck is getting the push as the #1 pick in next year's draft.

 

Stanford really was only getting screw over if there were several viable alternatives, which while Stanford, the Pac 10 and Rose Bowl would have been annoyed over, they would have accepted. Now? There isn't an alternative to an 11-1, #5 ranked (at worst) Stanford that only lost to the #1 team in the country.

 

John

[Jingus]

If an MMA fighter truly "got it" in the Meltzerian sense, and really cared about it on that level as much as Dave does, they'd stop being an MMA fighter. The reason they continue in the sport is because they're sportsmen. They're competitors in a game, and games are defined by their rules. If you really want competitors to change how they play the game, you change the rules.

Totally agree with that. I've never understood the "yeah he won, but it was boring" complaint about some fights. And? Would you have liked the guys to call some spots in the back before the fight in order to spice it up? "Hey Mir, you go for a powerbomb and I'll reverse it into a hurricanrana". When you're confined in a small space with an athletic badass who's trying to beat the shit out of you, your mind is hardly focused on entertaining the crowd. The fighters have very little control over how "exciting" their fight is, otherwise every fight would be an action-packed edge-of-your-seat experience. There have been a very small number of guys who can actually do that, Sakuraba probably being the best example, but even then there's no guarantee that they won't go out there on the night and turn in a stinker. If you don't stress the importance of winning over all other factors, then it's not a goddamned sport.

[KrisZ]

Newsday today at http://www.newsday.com/sports/columnists/m...-lift-1.2499233 writes that Ultimate Fighter needs a facelift for next season. Okay, there is a point to the format being the same for 12 seasons. However, the current season has done the second strongest ratings for any season since season III. And the story saying TUF needs to put the focus on the fights and fighting and not focus on the coaches makes me shake my head. He noted on GSP vs. Koscheck: "Fans are going to be interested in that fight whether they go along on the four-month journey with the coaches." The wrestling announcer (Jim Ross a few days ago) is so much more on the money then the MMA reporter when it comes to getting business.

[kjh]

The latest from Dave in the Fitch thread:

 

In every sport guys like Fitch get cut before guys like Tito.

 

There's your answer. There are a bevy of reasons why, whether it's getting along with coaches, being talented in ways the coach doesn't care about, the nebulous not fitting into the team structure, guys get traded for fucking the wrong girl, getting bad pub, just aggravating people, or not having a fan base. Good guys get cut before dicks if they don't fit into the big picture goal of the team. If it's a team in a non-major sport, if you don't think one player having a following doesn't effect decisions in comparison to a player who has no following, then you don't have a clue.

 

People who use the comparison of pro wrestling only expose they know nothing about professional sports. Now, in some sports because of being at different levels of success, the winning of games, which is a priority, is influenced more than others. But major sports make salary cap decisions. If it's a sport where if one starting pitcher drew 60,000 on average and another drew 18,000 on average, that would absolutely play into decisions regarding who stays and who goes.

 

That college bowl analogy works and you guys who said it didn't missed the entire point. No, a bowl is a privilege not a right. And a spot in UFC is a privilege, not a right. Football teams play all season to get into Bowl games that are chosen partially based on who travels best and win-loss record (and to an extent, how good the team actually is). UFC fighters are chosen for big matches based on who people want to see fight, and winning fights influences it, but there are a lot of things influencing it.

 

This sports vs. entertainment vs. business stuff is based on people who have never worked in any sports business. It's like arguing wrestling vs. sports entertainment which is a stupid argument as well. The argument is what works and what doesn't work. It's something that changes. Ultimately, you have to give the fan a positive experience and more importantly, a storyline to bring them back. In the NFL, all the people in management talk about is storylines as far as what drives the business and they are the most solid organization because of their TV deal. For growth of the business, wins and losses is irrelevant because every game ends with a winner or loser. There's a great incentive to win, but UFC fighters also have a great incentive to win. But to the people who pay the freight, the networks, they want a game that people won't turn out of out of boredom in the third quarter and a game with a storyline that will get people to watch who are casual fans.

The NFL schedule is locked in place before the season starts. The TV schedule is greatly influenced by storylines, which is why you see the Vikings on prime time so much. It's influenced by who wins of course, but if the Vikings had a worse record than another team, it is hardly automatic that other team gets the prime time slot.

 

Schedule makers in all sports are influenced by putting together games (Jets-Giants, 49ers-Raiders, A's-Giants) with more frequency than teams not even in the same leagues should meet based on natural drawing power.

 

The NBA schedule this year was held hostage because until LeBron made his decision, they couldn't do a schedule because which ever team got LeBron had to be available for games on the right nights that would draw the most ratings. One of the reasons UFC couldn't book arenas late this year is because any building with an NBA team couldn't give them a Saturday night until the schedule came out, delayed because of LeBron.

 

Many college football and college basketball teams for years would manipulate their schedules for easy out of conference wins, and weak times would schedule strong teams based on getting good payoffs to essentially walk into the hornet's nest.

 

There is no such thing as a sport that makes revenue (or where there is a risk of losing revenue it's even stronger) where revenue doesn't greatly influence many major decisions.

 

The College Football system is archaic, but that doesn't make college football pro wrestling any more than UFC is pro wrestling because they book fights based on what matches they think will sell, as long as the matches are real.

 

And to make sure nobody is confused, if Fitch is a title contender, he's virtually immune (unless he does something stupid) from being cut. The whole discussion is based on if he is no longer a contender.

[Log]

Has Dave ever busted out an ice skating/pro wrestling comparison? Ice skating has colorful costumes and it's an exhibition of moves put together to pop a crowd/judges. Seems a pretty apt comparison.

[Cox]

The NFL schedule is locked in place before the season starts. The TV schedule is greatly influenced by storylines, which is why you see the Vikings on prime time so much. It's influenced by who wins of course, but if the Vikings had a worse record than another team, it is hardly automatic that other team gets the prime time slot.

 

Schedule makers in all sports are influenced by putting together games (Jets-Giants, 49ers-Raiders, A's-Giants) with more frequency than teams not even in the same leagues should meet based on natural drawing power.

Wow, do these quotes ever show that Dave doesn't know what he's talking about. The Vikings were on the primetime schedule frequently because they went to the NFC Championship Game last year and were expected to be one of the better teams in the NFL this year. The NFL did recently start the "flex scheduling" on Sunday nights, but NBC is still reluctant to change their games unless they are absolute dogs because CBS and Fox have right of first refusal to the marquee games on Sunday afternoon. Nobody would want to see, say, a Vikings/Cowboys game on Sunday night if it had been scheduled later in the season, because despite having Brett Favre (a name attraction) and the Cowboys (one of the most popular teams in the league) playing each other, nobody would want to watch two dog teams play one another.

 

As far as his other point, the Jets play the Giants once every four years during the regular season (though they do play a preseason game that most folks don't care too much about). Same with the Raiders and the 49ers. The NFL doesn't sneak an extra Raiders/49ers game into the schedule every year because it would have interest in the Bay Area; it's treated the same as any other inter-conference rivalry. The A's do play the Giants more times than they would any other NL team, but less than they would any other American League rival; even if an extra A's/Giants series every year probably would mean more for their box office than, say, A's/Orioles, it's not treated as particularly special compared to any other American League rival.

 

Really, Dave needs to stop bringing other sports into this, because they make his own points look bad, and it shows how little he truly grasps the concepts in other sports.

[Loss]

This is far worse than Wade Keller freaking out about MVP's headlocks.

[Wahoos Leg]

As a sports writer who spends about half his year covering college football, reading Dave's "arguments" makes my head hurt.

[Ditch]

To slightly add to what Cox said, the NFL's overall schedule is literally based on a firm set of rules that never takes into account what matchups are more profitable. If the NFL was 'pro wrestling', it would go out of its way to make the NFL Channel games cream-of-the-crop matchups instead of stuff like Jets vs Bengals that at no point before or during the season was going to be a draw. Let's not even go into the fact that the Lions are still on every Thanksgiving after a decade of awful football and the city becoming the first ruins in the history of the US.

[Sean Liska]

The primetime decisions, like the NFL channel games, do take drawing power into consideration. Jets-Bengals was a playoff game last year, the Jets are a media sensation, and Cincy looked interesting with TO and Ochocinco. They also stagger when games take place, like Colts-Pats always happening during November sweeps. Where Dave is wrong, though, is saying that certain teams play each other more often because of drawing power. That is set in advance.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Has Dave ever busted out an ice skating/pro wrestling comparison? Ice skating has colorful costumes and it's an exhibition of moves put together to pop a crowd/judges. Seems a pretty apt comparison.

I always used to make the comparison when I was married. My wife loved Figure Skating/ Ice Dancing so I watched a hell of a lot of it. Amateur skating is more like boxing, cause it's supposed to be a sport but it's terribly corrupt and fixed. Pro Figure Skating is totally fixed. Wrestling is more like the Ice Capades, if they were pretending to compete.

 

Granted the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding fued started strong, but fizzled when the Olympic Committee booked the whole Harding "I need to retie my skates" debacle. And then they decidedb to push young Oksana Baiul at both's expense to pop the crowd, based on her storyline about coming up poor in the Ukraine.

[sek69]

Also ice skating is probably the worst offender (right after pro wrestling) of top stars staying around too long until it starts to get sad seeing someone who was a world champion 10 years ago try to compete.

[S.L.L.]

People who use the comparison of pro wrestling only expose they know nothing about professional sports.

OH MY GOD! THE IRONYMETER IS REACHING CRITICAL MASS! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!

[Bob Morris]

Further adding to what has already been said about the NFL and its scheduling, the process works like this.

 

First, everybody in each division plays each other twice. Since I'm a Broncos fan, I'll use the AFC West as an example: Denver must play San Diego, Oakland and Kansas City twice.

 

Then comes the pairing of the AFC West with another AFC division. This year, it was the AFC South, meaning Denver gets to play Indy, Tennessee, Jacksonville and Houston.

 

Then comes the pairing with an NFC division. This year, it was the NFC West, so Denver gets Seattle, St. Louis, Arizona and San Francisco.

 

Every other AFC West team plays these teams as well.

 

Then comes the final pairing... whatever place the team finishes in a division, it plays the two teams in the other divisions in the same conference who placed at the same spot within the division. So Denver drew the Jets and Baltimore, San Diego got Cincy and the Pats, Oakland got Pittsburgh and Miami and KC played Buffalo and Cleveland.

 

After that is all set, then they go forward with the schedule. The only games in which there is any "flexibility" allowed are the Sunday night games down the stretch. The Thursday and Monday games are all set in stone, although they try to pick marquee matchups based on what happened last year.

 

As for the Dallas-Minnesota example mentioned, Dallas still draws by name so people will watch it, even if Dallas isn't doing very well. At the same time, the NFL does not just specifically put Dallas into every prime time slot it can... the slots are divided among many teams, not just looking at marquee matchups, but also what are expected to be key divisional contests.

 

And then there's the London game... I don't know the process for choosing that, but it certainly wasn't a headliner that got it this year. Denver vs. the Niners wasn't looked at as a marquee matchup even before the season started.

 

The NFL does promote teams that have a national following (Dallas being a prime example) and players who are hot commodities, but that's for marketing purposes, not the purpose of determining who will be in everybody's lineup and who will be the chosen ones to get to the Super Bowl. And the NFL certainly doesn't try to schedule things or manipulate referees to ensure the chosen ones make it. All you have to do is look at this year's season... certainly the NFL would love for the Dallas Cowboys to make it to the Super Bowl because it will be held in their stadium, but anyone who follows the NFL knows that's not going to happen.

 

As far as why the NFL chose that site, they chose it because it's a modern facility, not solely because they hoped that the Cowboys would get there. Certainly the NFL would like it to happen, but they weren't hellbent on it happening either.

 

At any rate... Dave really needs to quit trying to compare the marketing side of NFL, NBA, MMA, etc., to the WWE or any pro wrestling promotion. With pro wrestling, the most marketable guys are the ones that the promotions makes damn well sure win on a regular basis and beat the opponents they are supposed to beat. With the NFL, jobber Buffalo nearly beat main eventer Pittsburgh and only failed to do so because Steve Johnson dropped a pass.

 

And no, the NFL didn't secretly whisper to Johnson to drop that pass so proper booking would be achieved.

[jdw]

The latest from Dave in the Fitch thread:

 

In every sport guys like Fitch get cut before guys like Tito.

Reggie Wayne & Marvin Harrison = Jon Fitch

 

Randy Moss & TO = Tito

 

In a sense, Wayne & Harrison are/were greater than Fitch. On the other hand, Moss & TO are greater than Tito. Moss was/is a sublime talent, generally thought to be the best of his era, and was on pace to top all of Rice's records if he wasn't as big of prick as Tito was.

 

When was the last time Wayne got cut?

 

Four teams have literally gotten rid of Moss because he wore out his welcome: they just wanted him gone. A fifth will soon join the others.

 

Four teams traded for him / picked him up because they thought he could help him win games, not because they thought he could sell merchandise or get them on primetime.

 

Seriously... does anyone think Bill Belichick gives a shit about merch or TV? His owner is a businessman, but Kraft also knows that no one outside of Boston ever gives a shit about the Pats when they aren't a Super Bowl contender. Doesn't matter if they have gun slinging QBs, which they've had a lot of in Plunkett, Grogan, Eason and Beldsoe. It's being that high end contender that made them one of America's teams.

 

Tom Brady didn't become a star because he's banging models.

 

He became a star by winning a Super Bowl in his first year as a starter. And his third... and his 4th. *Then* people started giving a shit if he was banging models.

 

In the long history of pro football, guys like Tito get cut and thrown away all the time. Joe Montana was kicked to the curb in Dave's very own Bay Area because the 49ers wanted to win more than have the most famous player in the game QB them. Steve Young gave them a better chance of winning at that point. They did the same to Jerry Rice when it was time to go. After a few good years across the bay, the Raiders kicked Jerry to the curb. Namath, Unitis... freaking Kurt Warner couldn't get a job after two MVP's, a Super Bowl ring and another trip to the Super Bowl. I'm sure that Dave is going to say that Kurt was Jon Fitch boring, but that's wrong: Kurt was one of the most exciting gunslinging QB of the era, the definition of "exciting fights".

 

OJ was kicked to the curb in Buffalo when they found a mark to take him off their hands, then Bill Walsh ran him after his first year in SanFran.

 

The list is endless.

 

There are plenty of Jon Fitch types who had long careers with one team, or only left via Free Agency because of a better offer.

 

The NFL is a business. Huge business, and run like a business. No doubt about it, and TV tries to sell personalities.

 

But it's not a great sport to use for a Fitch/Tito analogy, especially when you don't regularly follow the sport.

 

John

[KrisZ]

The latest from Dave in the Fitch thread:

 

In every sport guys like Fitch get cut before guys like Tito.

Reggie Wayne & Marvin Harrison = Jon Fitch

 

Randy Moss & TO = Tito

 

In a sense, Wayne & Harrison are/were greater than Fitch. On the other hand, Moss & TO are greater than Tito. Moss was/is a sublime talent, generally thought to be the best of his era, and was on pace to top all of Rice's records if he wasn't as big of prick as Tito was.

 

When was the last time Wayne got cut?

 

Four teams have literally gotten rid of Moss because he wore out his welcome: they just wanted him gone. A fifth will soon join the others.

 

Four teams traded for him / picked him up because they thought he could help him win games, not because they thought he could sell merchandise or get them on primetime.

 

Seriously... does anyone think Bill Belichick gives a shit about merch or TV? His owner is a businessman, but Kraft also knows that no one outside of Boston ever gives a shit about the Pats when they aren't a Super Bowl contender. Doesn't matter if they have gun slinging QBs, which they've had a lot of in Plunkett, Grogan, Eason and Beldsoe. It's being that high end contender that made them one of America's teams.

 

Tom Brady didn't become a star because he's banging models.

 

He became a star by winning a Super Bowl in his first year as a starter. And his third... and his 4th. *Then* people started giving a shit if he was banging models.

 

In the long history of pro football, guys like Tito get cut and thrown away all the time. Joe Montana was kicked to the curb in Dave's very own Bay Area because the 49ers wanted to win more than have the most famous player in the game QB them. Steve Young gave them a better chance of winning at that point. They did the same to Jerry Rice when it was time to go. After a few good years across the bay, the Raiders kicked Jerry to the curb. Namath, Unitis... freaking Kurt Warner couldn't get a job after two MVP's, a Super Bowl ring and another trip to the Super Bowl. I'm sure that Dave is going to say that Kurt was Jon Fitch boring, but that's wrong: Kurt was one of the most exciting gunslinging QB of the era, the definition of "exciting fights".

 

OJ was kicked to the curb in Buffalo when they found a mark to take him off their hands, then Bill Walsh ran him after his first year in SanFran.

 

The list is endless.

 

There are plenty of Jon Fitch types who had long careers with one team, or only left via Free Agency because of a better offer.

 

The NFL is a business. Huge business, and run like a business. No doubt about it, and TV tries to sell personalities.

 

But it's not a great sport to use for a Fitch/Tito analogy, especially when you don't regularly follow the sport.

 

John

 

Bravo

[Death From Above]

The only example I can think of in major north American sport of schedule manipulation directly for more games that draw ratings (meaning nobody counts Jets/Giants preseason football out of maybe a 100 mile radius on the east coast) is the NHL's concession to have the 6 Canadian teams play each other every year, regardless of who else they play from the other conference. Three teams are in each of the east and west, and under normal conditions they wouldn't play every year both home and away otherwise.

 

And the only real reason every team in the east doesn't play every team in the west and vice versa every year is because so many of the eastern teams have much softer travel schedules and they like keeping it that way (the Bruins played something like 30+ games in a row last year without leaving the eastern time zone, for example). It's not an issue of nobody in New York caring about San Jose or Vancouver. Nobody in New York cares about Florida either, but they still play.

 

In terms of "drawing power" the NHL would actually be thrilled to send Crosby for Pittsburgh and Ovechkin for Washington, and now Stamkos for Tampa Bay, to every single town. It would be much better business for them and they know it. All three of those stars happen, by luck and fortune, to currently play for eastern teams, so they aren't guaranteed to hit every west city each year. But the eastern teams will never go for it because it messes with their softer travel schedule. Teams like Boston or Carolina don't give a shit about the NHL trying to build overall drawing power using Crosby and Ovechkin and have no real desire to hit Anaheim and Vancouver every year. And conversely, nobody in Phoenix gives a shit if the New York Islanders come to town. So even though it would be the best thing for TV and local promotion when certain big names hit town, it won't ever happen.

[jdw]

The NFL *does* slot the schedule in a fashion to draw. It always has, and we all know this.

 

The problem, which Bob pointed to, is that the "who-plays-who" aspect of the schedule is not something the NFL manipulates. The game-making / match-making aspect it done according to a publically known policy that's practially bianary in its brainlessness. The NFL can't "book" a Vikes vs Colts game last season simply because Farve went to Minny and Farve-Manning = Ratings. The only way that game happens is if the that happened to be the year the Colts division played the Vikes division *and* the two teams were lined up in how those divisions matched up under the rules.

 

Where the NFL does manipulate the schedule is if they got lucky and that game was spit out of the scheduling program. In that case, it's 100% certain that the NFL would make sure that game is in PrimeTime on NBC. They would also make sure that it wasn't scheduled the same week as something like a rematch of the two Super Bowl teams from the prior year (in that case it would have been PIT vs AZ in a Big Ben vs Warner match up), or some other marque match up that they might want to put on NBC.

 

They also manipulate the schedule so that certain Big Ratings matches up that happen twice a year are split between "Conference Network" (Fox with NFC and CBS with AFC) and "National Network" (mostly NBC for the biggest, but also ESPN to a degree).

 

By that I mean:

 

Pats vs Jets happens twice a year because it's in-division. New York market, Boston market, Brady, Pats... drawing power.

 

The NFL tries not to give one of them to NBC and one of them to ESPN, because that would take from CBS two of their best rated games.

 

The NFL also tries not to steal both the Pats-Jets and another strong AFC game (say Colts-PIT) for both NBC and ESPN in one week, which really hoses CBS.

 

If it's a week where they're lifting Pats-Jets for NBC, it wouldn't even be surprising to see that something like Colts-PIT isn't even on the schedule, and instead ended up on a different week... so that it could be on NBC.

 

Those are the types of things that the NFL does. They get spit out the Slate Of All Games that will be played in a year. *Then* they starting placing the match-ups into different weeks and different slots based on (i) what draws, (ii) keeping each of the networks happy, (iii) in the end some match-ups just have to be put into slots because there is no other place for them, and (iv) to leave the NFL with some flexibility for Weeks 11-17 to work the Flex Scheduling.

 

So who-plays-who is out of the hands of the league.

 

"When" and "where" they play is something the League and the Networks control, with the League knowing well enough that they need to keep all the networks happy, and not just NBC's primetime slot. Why?

 

$1.1B ESPN

$713M FOX

$650M NBC

$623M CBS

 

NBC is 21% of the current network contracts. The NFL, the smartest batch of guys in the sports business, knew long before anyone else that you want to bring as many networks to the table as possible to get them all a taste of the meal. More at the table means more $$$. That $$$ only comes if they all are happy and think that they're getting value, part of which is not seeing NBC get *all* they drawing games.

 

The NFL is masters at this.

 

John