I got all the way to Labor Day weekend without assuring I would have a spot in a fantasy football league. Now it turns out the two leagues I had are not reforming, and the one I thought I might enter has no room. So maybe I'll create a name for a fake team, Plaxico's Pistoleros, and stay out of football as long as he does.

Labels: football, sports

Frankly, the legend of Michael Vick will be determined as we go forward. It won't be determined on the field of football. His life, he will never ever be able to recover from what he criminally and murderously took part in, but he has an opportunity to create a legend where maybe he can be a force in stopping the horrendous cruelty to animals, the dogfighting. A lot of us probably have our heads in the sands, and I know I have, when it comes to what really goes on in inner cities and around the country with dogfighting and cruelty to animals. It's not a good picture.

That's Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, from Mike Lombardi's Sunday at the (Football) Post column (which you should read all the way through for more, and every Sunday if you like both football and management.) I don't care about Vick as a football player, though as a Giants fan I'm worried about the two games we play them. But I spent some of my earlier years working on animal welfare issues, managing a foster dog care network for abandoned animals. Mrs. S is more the animal rights person than me, but marriage to her means seeing so many depressing pictures of cruelty. It's not the only reason I've been vegetarian for more than 20 years, but as I try to balance my diet more lately I still think about eating things with faces, and shudder.

Labels: football, Gratitude

Frank Stephenson questions a comment by Allen Sanderson on why NFL teams don't invest more in their player personnel. Regarding Mitch's Bears' choice of quarterback,

...what if a better quarterback (which means almost anyone since the imcumbent is Rex Grossman) allowed the Bears to charge higher ticket prices while selling out Soldier Field? This source indicates that stadium "gate" revenue is spilt 60-40 between the home and visiting teams, respectively. Thus, even a team could reap a large, though not complete, share of revenue generated by a QB upgrade.

I had thought about playoff revenue as a motivator. The players only get $18,000 per game in the playoffs, and thought team revenues would help with that. True, the teams only get $500k-$600k from the league for playoff games (less than a million for the conference championship, and about $3.5 million for the conference winner), but I am wondering who gets the concession revenue? Concession and parking prices can be adjusted upwards for playoff games. If it's the home team (or, possibly, its subsidiary that runs the stadium) that, along with player cost control, might provide some serious incentives.

What we know from baseball -- where the home team bags a much bigger share of the revenue both during the season and post-season -- is that a player has the highest value to a team that is in a big market and to a team that is on the edge between making and not making the playoffs. The steep price increase for players of above average major league talent is an indicator of that. If Stephenson is right, a Lorenz curve of player values versus salaries should show much more evenness for football than for baseball.

Labels: baseball, economics, football, sports