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A holiday rant: Which sport is the most unfair?
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It seems like every Holiday season when I get together with family and friends there is one subject that gets the old Irish folk all riled up – sports. It has been a running theme for my family to pick a sports topic that pisses us off and rant about it almost every day, from Christmas to New Years.
With the recession gripping everyone in D.C., there was considerable rage at my family get-togethers. This year’s meddlesome sports theme was a question (that we pondered over a few adult beverages).
Which sport serves up more injustice to its fans, players and coaches? Basically which one of the major sports (college or pro) is just flat out unfair, lacks competitive balance and/or falls short of presenting a true champion.
The first sport to land squarely in the crosshairs of my family’s rage was college football. And the rant began.
It's an all-about-the-money pageant, not a classic gridiron competition. It's a fraud, it's a hoax, and it's ruining college football as we know it. If the holidays are here, that means it's once again time to spew out the Bowl Championship Series.
Pigskin pundits, coaches, players, fans and even the President-elect of the United States are up in arms about the controversial selections for the BCS title game and the system itself.
But the powers that be don't seem to notice. The presidents of the 66 BCS schools are collectively covering their ears, stubbornly refusing to admit they're wrong.
Want proof? Even as Barack Obama was calling for a playoff system just days after being elected president, the school leaders were happily signing a new four-year contract to extend the BCS through 2014.
True and unadulterated injustice, the system isn’t fair to fans, players and coaches just to name a few.
Then amidst the Bud Light, egg nog and my grandmother’s famous “What in the hell is that” casserole a new challenger arose.
What about baseball?
The Yankees just spent about nine times the Tampa Bay Rays entire payroll on three free agents. But it’s not as if that was the first instance of the big market clubs in baseball’s capless conundrum dominating the little guys in a completely frightening way. Madonna’s boyfriend, Alex Rodriguez, made$28 million in 2008, which just happens to be more than the entire team salary for the Florida Marlins ($22 million and change). That same team had more than double the total payroll of all but nine other MLB franchises last season. Who knows what the final number will be for the Yanks team salary in 2009, but it sure won’t seem fair to fans in Baltimore or D.C.
The Nats had no shot at Teixeira; the lure of the Yankees aura was too much. It will always be too much and D.C. baseball will never be able to compete. That is one of the greatest injustices in sports today; the Yankees are robbing small market clubs all over the nation from watching their home town sluggers knock it into the night sky. What an injustice, a fight that pits David against Goliath and the big guy gets the sling shot.
So what do you think out there? These were our top two.
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