The Wide World of Sport

In the Great American Sports Landscape, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: professional sports, where the players are for the most part compensated for their performance, and youth sports, where the players are without remuneration for their play.

Somewhere in the middle is the unique phenomenon of American collegiate sport, which is a monster all its own.

Professional sports, where the athletes are now, for the most part, paid for their performance, is the pinnacle of sport. The greatest athletes and competitors of almost every sport flock to America to ply their trade, exalting four of of the Big Five Men’s professional leagues—the NBA, the NFL, MLB, and the NHL—to be without question the most elite field of competition for their respective sports—basketball, American football, baseball, and hockey—in the entire world.

As the pinnacle of sport, the professional ranks are the smallest, yet most visible, slice of the American sporting culture. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are less than 20,000 professional athletes in America, and they count race car drivers, which I am alright considering a sport, and golfers, which I am decidedly ruling not-sport. Golf is so far from being a sport that they even move their ball out of the way should it even happen to land in the path another golfer might want to take to approach the hole, lest they be accidentally impeding another player. Call me when ball bumping is only one of several defensive tactics, like throwing a ball at a player while they are swinging, even.

In a population of 327 million, 20,000 professional athletes is not a lot. That’s less than 1/100th of a percent of the population. The leagues with actual livable league minimum contracts are even smaller. Fewer than 700 players play in the NBA and the WNBA combined. Fewer than 5,000 players have played in the NBA in its entire history. Fewer than 1,700 play in the NFL. Fewer than 700 in the NHL. MBL employs fewer than 800 players. The competition for those sports is fierce, and every year a scant handful of new players end up making it onto a professional roster.

To put that into a bit of context, there are almost 500,000 collegiate athletes in the 24 different athletic competitions that the National Collegiate Athletic Association calls sports, which does include a fair number of the traditional Olympic sports that I am discounting as sports on account of the lack of defense. The NCAA also counts golf, but not race car driving, which seems like an oversight on the part of their committee.

73,557 players play collegiate American football every year, and over a million play high school football. Despite this disparity, the vast majority of the studies on the physical costs of playing American football have been conducted on professional players. On top of there being many more players paying those physical costs at the high school level, those who make it to the professional ranks are by definition the most elite athletes in the game, thereby most able to perform the subtle shifts to make the impact less than debilitating. The more clumsy players are more likely to take worse hits, suffer worse falls.

For now, the focus has been to the costs paid by professional players, but when the conversation shifts and studies start being done on the long term costs paid by these young bodies in this brutal game, the insurance companies will have to step in and either eliminate the game, or severely alter it to reduce the damage. For now, football remains the most American of sports, the sport least embraced by the rest of the world and most embraced by the American viewing public.

The total number of basketball players in college is over 10,000, with over 1.5 million playing in high school. College basketball is host to the greatest sporting tournament in the American annual sports calendar, which produces a staggering amount of advertising and gambling revenue, while the players are just recently even allowed to be paid for the commercials featuring their exploits.

The combined 80,000+ players of American football and basketball comprise the biggest problem for college sports, because the players are all but indistinguishable, physically, from their professional counterparts, and people enjoy watching them with a furor that in some cases surpasses the love for the professional versions of the game.

College has a generational kind of regional appeal that is unique to the university setting. A grandfather might have worked as a yard maintenance technician for the university, earning free school for his kids, whose kids in turn go on to attend the university they grew up loving. With its broad array of fields and jobs, university is part of the social fabric of a region in a way that a mercenary professional club just isn’t.

College sports straddles the line between professional and youth sports, featuring aspects of each. This twilight existence creates a heavy discontinuity where the subject of paying the players, who are the ones actually producing the entertainment value and facing the career threatening injury risk, while almost every one else involved in the sport is making boatloads of money.

Collegiate sport does produce absolute buckets of cash, by the way. When you combine the compounding generational loyalty with a quality of sport that is nearly professional at its very highest levels of both individual and collective performance, you end up with an absolute marketing perfect storm. Over 100 million people tune in to watch the end of the year tournament for college basketball, compared to the 15.4 million who watched last year’s NBA finals.

A lot of people are making a lot of money off the collegiate sporting spectacle, primarily by virtue of the two big cash cows of American football and basketball. The person who organizes even one of the end of season football bowl games can expect a million dollar payout. The head coaches in both sports are all being paid millions of dollar every year.

The people who aren’t making a bank of the tremendous business of these two sports are the players. Players are only recently even allowed to have advertising contracts, while risking their professional futures with every game they play. Players have been known to take out injury insurance policies, as a measure of protection, but no insurance company is going to bet too regularly on a player’s chance of being one of the handful that make it to the professional ranks in a given year.

Collegiate competition is the peak of what are termed by the NCAA as amateur sports, which is sports that are defined by not paying the players. The argument is that since these are amateur sports, the players must not be paid, because if they were paid then they would no longer be amateur sports. I’m not kidding, that circular argument is exactly what the NCAA has brought to the court proceedings on the matter.

For the vast majority of the 450,000+ student athletes this remuneration discrepancy isn’t terrifically unfair. Most collegiate sports do not draw the kind of television or in-person viewership so as to generate enough revenue to make the argument about paying the players as relevant as it is where football and basketball are concerned. Barely a half a million people watched the college world series, compared to the average of 14 million who tuned in to catch the professional version. Even fewer people tune in for the soccer or hockey collegiate championships.

The good news for the prospect of eventually paying these players for their time and efforts is that viewership for almost every collegiate sport is trending up, unlike some of the professional viewership numbers which have stagnated or, in baseball’s case, regressed over the last thirty years.

The upward trend in collegiate viewership numbers mirrors the upward trend for youth sports participation in general, which happens to coincide with a downward trend in religious participation in the US.

While the majority of the United States does still claim to have some religious affiliation, the number of those claiming to be atheist or agnostic has almost doubled in the last twenty years, according to the PEW Research Center, from 13% to nearly a third of the population. Even among those who claim a religious affiliation, active participation on a weekly basis has dropped to a mere 30% of the population. Both membership and attendance numbers have dropped across the United States for almost 50 years, now.

It is difficult to view this drop in religious participation without considering the rise in mental health difficulties and opioid abuse across the country. In the view of religion as a kind of firmware for the societal machine, this shift to a more pluralistic environment is like transitioning series of servers off of an old firmware onto a new one, experiencing some technical difficulties along the way. The many benefits that organized religion has offered to human societies throughout the entirety of human history are beginning to go unfilled, and society is suffering a kind of malaise in the absence.

While this is happening, more and more families are participating in youth sports every year. Every weekend parks are flooded with league games of one kind or another. Many families rotate through sports for the full calendar year, playing baseball in the summer, soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and so on, with almost 40% of teenagers playing multiple sport seasons in a year. According to Project Play, a report by the Aspen Institute, three out of every four American households have at least one school aged student participating in youth sports.

Over 55% of all American children play youth sports, and it is likely that number would be even higher except for the money starting to dominate the youth sport scene. Like college sports, the money flowing through and around youth sports grows every year, with many youth clubs requiring over $10,000 per year to participate. This growing cost of participation limits the player pool to families with more disposable income. Only 27% of children from homes with incomes under $25k a year play sports, compared with 45% of kids from homes with incomes in excess of $100k a year.

Even despite concussion concerns causing a 18% decline in youth American football participation, over 45 million children participate in youth sports. A staggering 90% of parents attend a game every week when their children are involved in a sport, meaning over half the country is involved in youth sports on an active, weekly basis, for at least a season.

I know that when I grew up, my parents carefully balanced my participation across both sport and church obligations. Saturdays were games, and Sundays were church. Summers were split between church camps and vacation bible school, and sports camps and, later, tournaments. I’m sure there are many families who still navigate the two together, but for an increasing portion of the population, sport and its attendant benefits are coming to fill a lot of the roles that religion has historically filled. In future posts I will explore exactly how this is happening.

I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that sport is a religion, or should be a religion, with codified belief structures and metaphysical belief claims. I am simply going to outline some of the ways that organized religion, as an institution, not simply as a belief system, has served to make society more livable while looking at the ways that sport does now fill some of those same societal support roles in our increasingly pluralistic society.