Are You Not Entertained

 

I recently listened to Mark Cuban on the Lex Fridman podcast. He was talking about how when he bought the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, he made a fundamental shift in how the organization was run, in that he took it from “our objective is to win games on the court” to “our objective is to give fans a memorable experience.” As it turns out, he helped turn around a perennial loser into a league champion, so maybe the best way to achieve the former is to pursue the latter. But that’s not the point of my post today.

What I want to explore is how multiple sports are having an existential crisis about how teams are playing to win (the former) is leading to an inferior product for fans (the latter). Blame analytics, I guess. In basketball, teams have figured out that drawing fouls and shooting threes is the way to success, which is sometimes exciting but often dull. In baseball, “manufacturing runs” through bunts and stolen bases has given way to the “sit on your ass” strategy of drawing walks and swinging for the fences. Even football, the darling spectator sport of the moment, is raging at the reigning Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles reliance on the decidedly unaesthetic “tush push” play and pish-poshing their starting quarterback Jalen Hurts for not racking up gaudy stats like Brady and Manning once did. 

Athletes are motivated by a lot of things – popularity, money, stability – but almost everyone is extremely wired for championships, and the best teams have deep buy-in on that singular goal. What happens when the means to that end doesn’t make for good viewing? 

Leagues can tinker with the rules, of course, but that’s risky. Anti-tanking and “load management” restrictions in the NBA have been tricky to implement. The “tush push” was up for banning and barely passed. Interestingly, baseball, perhaps the most tradition-bound of the three sports, seems to have found success with things like a pitch clock and instant replay (although perhaps less success with trying to deaden and then liven the ball). 

We have become such an entertainment-saturated society that in many cases how entertaining something is has become more important than how successful it is. But despite what we may consume on social media, the path to financial stability and physical health and romantic love often consists of boring, uniform, and unglamorous steps. 

Maybe this is all sour grapes. If our teams win championships and our lives are prosperous, we tend to complain less than other team’s fans and others not doing as well. Ultimately, it is a truism about anything in life: if you figure out what you’re trying to achieve, and then do the things that help you accomplish that, you will be more likely to accomplish what you set out to do. And, if you don’t care whether that path is sexy or popular or applauded, then that too will increase your chances of success. The question is, whether it is a fan of a sports team or living out your own life: is our goal to be a success or to be entertainment?