Making sports better

Watching sports has been great for me. I love the passion it creates, the joy, the camaraderie. Living in New York, I’m lucky enough to be able to see the best of US sports and a lot of European soccer, often at times of day that don’t disrupt the family and with excellent coverage. Among my lifelong picks, somehow I chose the New England Patriots, at a time when they were not much good, and have been rewarded by a successful dynasty that may be unrivalled, especially given the way the NFL strives to lovel their playing field. Bill Belichick showed just one more time on Sunday how far ahead he is of his peers, so much so that pundits think another Patriot Superbowl win is almost inevitable, despite the fact that our talent is probably less than Phildelphia’s.

If you don’t follow sports, you are missing out on something that could be good in your life, and I encourage you to give it a try. It is never too late, and the rewards come quickly. For each sport, choose a team (or player) and then stay loyal.

Sports are great, and a lot of TV coverage is great too nowadays. When I watch old games I see how far forward things have come. Technology has helped, as has fitness and money – in the end all the cash has generated excellence, and we can all benefit.

But all sports can improve further. And one way is to look at what works in other sports and on other continents, and shamelessly copy where appropriate. It is good that sports are rather conservative about rule changes – that way lifelong fans and statistics are not disrespected – but evolution is good too. In particular, US sports can learn from their global counterparts and vice versa. Here are some examples.

For soccer, the single biggest change that I would advocate would be to increase the size of the goals, both height and width. That would be so sacrilegious, but I believe it would improve the game. Goalkeepers would hate it, but in the end they would perhaps benefit the most because their skills would be valued more highly. The main effect of making the goals bigger would be to generate more goals, and hence more excitement and fewer draws. The secondary effect would be to encourage offence and render the current curse of attack against defence games less likely, since the tactic is much less likely to work. Soccer snobs scoff at US pundits for disparaging the 0-0 draw, but we should recognise that they are correct. Grow those goals!

Next in soccer, I would institute a stopping clock, one that only moved when the ball was in play, like they have in US football or basketball and now rugby as well. This simple step would render timewasting worthless, and allow for such things as timeouts and quarters instead of halves. After that, I would add more referees and make greater use of replay technology – again learning from the NFL I would use it for all goals, penalties and sendings off and allow some coaches challenges. It can often be applied without stopping play. Conservatives hate replay, even in sports where it is now established, but it makes the games fairer. In US football, there is endless argument when a marginal call is overturned or not, but people lose sight of the much more common event of an egregious call being overturned – there was a great example on Sunday when a Minnesota touchdown was invalidated by clear evidence that the ball hit the turf.

US football can learn in the other direction. The game is in danger of becoming obsolete within a generation because of head trauma. Many kids are destined to have foreshortened lives, and this is not acceptable in modern society. My solution is to get rid of the helmets, replace then with softer head guards, and then apply tackling rules from rugby. The game can still be thrillingly violent and physical, but the kids could expect to escape most concussions. The only other thing I would change is to be slightly less in hoc to the TV adverts that pay for everything, via shorter and fewer breaks in play. It is farcical to watch a live game and observe all the players ready to continue but waiting for over a minute until the TV director gives a signal.

US basketball has become an ugly game dominated by personality rather than sports content, so I rarely watch it. I want to see brilliance and excitement, not a fawning camera or commentator focused only on a few players. That sort of culture is hard to change, but I have some other examples of potential rule changes. I would start with relegation. This is the main difference between US and European sports – because the owners choose it to be so, the teams in the leagues are always the same, unless an owner should choose the change. Further, while there are conferences, there is no hierarchy between divisions.

This has large consequences, most of them bad. In basketball, it is a disaster. To work towards parity, the teams with the worst records in a season get to choose first among graduating college players. In a game with only five on the court at a time, this is a big deal. And a result is that many teams are ambivalent or worse about their results as the season develops. If a team will not reach the playoffs, it pays to finish as poorly as possible. Even the playoffs offer only a minor advantage to teams with better records, so the regular season becomes seriously devalued. This is a travesty for fans.

It would be easily fixed by introducing a hierarchy of divisions. Divide the thirty teams into three divisions of ten. At the end of the season, institute promotion and relegation, via playoffs if desired. The worst team from division three goes out of the league altogether. At a stroke, we end the evil of “tanking”, create more games between top and evenly matched teams, and abolish most of the inconsequential games.

Baseball can benefit in the same way. It has even more inconsequential games – for many of the teams the season is more or less over from half way through. Divisions and relegation can change that in an instant. I think I would also divide the season into two mini-seasons, with promotion relegation twice per year.

Baseball also has the same problem as cricket, in that its traditional form starts to feel outdated in the world of instant gratification. Like cricket, this is hard to address, because a lot of the beauty of the game lies in its slow pace, and there is a risk that tinkering would lose more traditional fans than it would gain new ones. Cricket found something of a solution in having parallel formats. Rather than tinker more with the regular game, I think I would introduce a shorter parallel game in baseball – fewer innings, shorter at-bats, restricted pitcher changes and so on. In a three-day stretch, teams could play traditional games on two days, and two shorter games on the third day, in a separate league.

The US has some other strange habits with sports broadcasting, but could also teach the Europeans. My biggest gripe is the generalist play-by-play announcer. Joe Buck does a passable job at football, but then shows up commentating on big baseball games too, where he demonstrates that his knowledge of the game is not good enough. Imagine Martin Tyler commentating on cricket!

There are many other examples. For me the primary lesson is how reluctant institutions are to look beyond their walls and learn from outside. You find it in sports, in society and in business. In society, a great example is the use of traffic lights. In US cities, they have more lights, but they choreograph the timing between lights, and crucially they allow longer time periods to clear traffic. That would go along way to improve flow in London – yet so obvious a solution is not considered.

We all tend to be blind to such simple opportunities to learn and copy. Fortunes are spent on research and innovation, but the biggest improvements often come from the simplest and cheapest approaches. Take a look at your own business or even your own life. There are sure to be opportunities out there.

In the meantime, go Patriots. The dynasty must end one day, but let that day not come too soon.