Bud Selig is a Liar: Why I love Ted Leonsis and Mark Cuban

A little background for those of you who don't know me is in order. I am definitely in the statistically small group of people who knew who Mark Cuban was before he was a billionaire or knew who Ted Leonsis was before he was en route to becoming a billionaire (he's not there yet, but it's on his list of things to do) and owned all or parts of the Washington Capitals (NHL), Washington Wizards (NBA) and Washington Mystics (WNBA). Both Mark and Ted were very good to me going back some 10+ years now. One thing I love in my recent contact with these guys is that fame and success did not seem to change the overall makeup and drive of these two men.

I am grateful to both of them because at a time when I had a little bit of fire in my belly they took the spark and poured some gasoline on it and for me personally that's an extraordinary lovely thing.

Lying goes on all around us. We're lied to constantly. Interestingly as Ted and Mark both own sports franchises… Well think about this, as of a year ago, Mark had been fined $1.6 million dollars (that's probably more money than I have ever had at once)by the NBA. Why? He was fined for what he said, which was, an honest portrayal of how he felt. He was fined $1.6 million dollars for being honest. The league seems to believe that honesty is NOT the best policy for the NBA. I actually don't have strong feelings on David Stern or the NBA, certainly not in the way Cuban or Leonsis probably would.

I don't really know the inner workings of the NBA enough to comment on the inner workings of it or well enough to comment on whether David Stern is a person who acts with both the best interests of the NBA and integrity. It seems to me like he does, but I don't know well enough.

But I know enough about baseball, it's inner workings, psychology, values, etc., to know the following: Bud Selig is a liar. The owners and the management of the San Francisco Giants are…liars. Bud Selig is lying about Steroids. Yes, I said lying about it. And if he wishes to take me to court for slander, fine. All Selig can hope for is that by the time all of the "what did he know and when did he know it" comes out, that he'll be gone. He's playing the game of "musical chairs" and basically what Bud is probably hoping for is that by the time the music stops he's not around even LOOKING for a chair anymore.

This game works this way. The American public is in denial about how much we really like the results of steroids (I am not in denial about this at all, but sometimes I wish I still was!). The truth is, especially given the costs of attending this stuff, we want our professional athletes to be SUPER human. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa AND Barry Bonds delivered. We the fans like the results, the owners liked the results, and Bud Selig liked the results. You could say that there was so much covering of eyes, ears and mouths by Selig and ownership (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil), BUT there was also so much steroid usage that there's no way they got through this period without seeing or at least hearing about someone getting a needle jabbed in their butt. I'm not talking about last year or the year before either. I'm talking 1998-2002 when it was going on, everyone more or less knew it and then looked the other way.

Human nature is that when the stakes are high, people will cheat. This is why Jason Giambi cheated. And why, not only after he got caught (via leaked testimony – and the guy who leaked it is going to JAIL – I'm thrilled about that, probably the biggest smile of the week for me!!!) for steroids, he got caught for amphetamines (greenies) just last year. But Giambi came out with the truth:

I was wrong for doing that stuff. What we should have done a long time ago was stand up -- players, ownership, everybody -- and said: `We made a mistake.' We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. ... Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic that everybody wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it."

Although Giambi is a confirmed cheater, he is, in my opinion, absolutely correct about this. Here's how Selig is handling this: he's pressuring Giambi to cooperate with the steroids investigation: name some names or I will suspend you (more or less).

If Hank Aaron wants to be upset with Barry Bonds, I don't have any issue with that at all. But Bud Selig? Please. You knew Bud, and you looked the other way and did nothing. But then you're the kind of guy who would say, "Yeah, I'm an owner, but just go ahead and make me the commissioner!" We already knew right there this is a man lacking in integrity. But it made a lot of people a lot of money and produced a product people wanted to pay for. Everyone was really happy about this: the owners (they made tons of money on this), the players (they made tons of money – and much more with performance enhancements) and the fans, who couldn't eat it up fast enough.

But Bud is a lying hypocrite, so are the owners, and really so are most of the fans. Giambi did tell the truth in that quote above, that's exactly how it is. But once again, your kids are subtley getting the message: honesty isn't the best policy and cheating works – whether you're a player, the owner or the commissioner. It's a bad message to send. Giambi told the truth and the negative reinforcing feedback is, "Whoever told you honesty was the best policy, was lying!"

I love that there are guys like Cuban and Leonsis out there: again, they aren't perfect, but they aren't motivated to cheat and lie due to the stakes being high. They aren't perfect, but in a world massively lacking it at times, these two gentleman have some integrity, and that's something I value very much.

As for steroids, I think this ultimately will hit the NFL hardest of all. We haven't anywhere near begun to hear the last of it. Sorry Mr. Goodell.

Homework from Ted Leonsis and No, I don’t Think Roger Goodell is a “Poor Sap”

After a spirited email exchange with about 25 volleys, Mr. Leonsis did convince me not to overvalue the Nielsen Ratings for sporting events when it came to trying to correlate that to anything(other than the number of people who tuned in).

Then he gave me a book recommendation: The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Market Place. He told me he thought that was the kind of stuff I ought to be writing about.
By page 20, I was inclined to agree with him. The book combines so many things I love:


· Capitalism
· Psychology
· Sociology
· Philosophy
· Research/Science
· Fun with Numbers (data)
· and SPORTS!

While the Nielsen Ratings for NHL games are definitely bleak relative to NFL, MLB and NBA, what’s happening with the NHL is all part of a bigger trend. It may look worse for the NHL ratings wise (at least in terms of the Stanley Cup), but it’s all part of the same overall trend. All kinds of entertainment and “free-time” choices are available, and many of them don’t involve the television at all. The free-time itself is in limited supply.

The NBA, and MLB have certainly seen ratings declines. NBA Finals with scores like 75-72 aren’t helping with the ratings. We like scoring, just like we like home runs (I won’t go off into the steroids rant here) we want to see Lebron score 50 points and even if they lost 127-112, we’d like that better. 75-72 isn’t attractive to the casual fan.

The NFL faces the same challenges. The Super Bowl will probably remain golden for a long, long time though. It’s just a hunch, but the Super Bowl – that’s not about “football”. That’s about a national holiday to have an excuse to get drunk and have a party on a Sunday. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, only better because there’s gambling, square pools, etc. We’re not giving that up any sooner than we’re giving up St. Patrick’s Day.

But here’s the thing. My brain couldn’t really process it at first because it seems so counter intuitive to me. The NFL, NBA, MLB and the NHL will continue to experience lower ratings vs. the glory days, and mostly, the ratings aren’t going to come back. I know the NFL will try to squeeze out Brady vs. Manning in primetime wherever it can and it has the challenge of making more of its personalities interesting to the public in ways that don’t involve arrests for possessing 6,000 semi-automatic weapons.

Yesterday I said Tagliabue was a genius for getting out when he did, and that poor sap Roger Goodell was about to not know what hit him. I didn’t really mean that. They say do what you love, and you can’t go wrong, and sometimes I just love being a jackass. I said that the % of the Cincinnati Bengals arrested would be the least of his worries.

In truth, I believe Goodell’s focus is correct. Specifically because at a time when your fan base is bound to erode somewhat no matter what you do – and it will because “free-time” is limited, but the number of choices we have to fill the free-time keeps growing and growing – you absolutely do not want to have your players modeling behavior that risks alienating a fan base that was already bound to erode. It’s like pushing them out the door. I like his focus. And I like that Pacman “make it rain” Jones will not be suiting up for a single game this year.

But here’s the thing that’s counterintuitive. Despite the eroding fan bases and television ratings, the actual value and health of these leagues can continue to grow anyway, provided it’s managed well.

While even the NFL can’t escape the fan erosion, they of ALL the leagues are best positioned to really rake it in despite the erosion. Managed well, the MLB, NBA and NHL (yes, the NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE – there, I said it) can all do the same, albeit on a smaller scale. It was true 20 years ago and it is still true today. Even with record low ratings.

As for “record low Nielsen ratings” – breathe it in! We’re in a trend to hear that phrase applied to many things. Not just NHL, or NBA finals – it’s already hit the evening news. Katie Couric is taking the heat for that, but really, it’s all part of the same game – limited free time, more choices, more record low ratings. For just about everything really.

But for now and the foreseeable future, television will be a very powerful medium, but with fewer and fewer things that have the capability to bring in massive # of people. That makes the NFL worth…more than it has ever been. Even with eroding ratings. I am not worried about Roger Goodell, and he is no poor sap.

I predict a follow up to the book The Elusive Fan. It will be: The Elusive Viewer: Reinventing Television in a Crowded Marketplace. The beauty of it is, they could just do a find and replace to randomly replace all the “sports” terms with television terms and as is – this book would be more valuable to TV executives than anything they’re reading in Variety. Or, they could just read it as is.

The Brave New World Where Everything is Fragmented

Of course complicating things even further, not all the players involved are all that brave. I’ve seen this happen before (think about a newspaper industry that was once booming that can now often not give away free newspapers). We were all talking about that stuff in the mid ‘90s and it has certainly come to pass.

Think about this: the Sopranos, the most influential drama (especially considering it wasn’t on a broadcast network) probably of the last 20 years. It drew about 11.9 million viewers on Sunday, making it only the 4th most watched episode ever. Number one was the 2002 season premier (13.4 million).

I’m still not quite sure that the NHL is really in better shape just because franchise values are up. It’s true that the multiple is the multiple (and right now that multiple seems to be 3.5x revenue). But it’s also true that: the multiple is the multiple, until it isn’t.

But what’s going on with the NHL, the NBA and the Sopranos is the EXACT same problem: limited free time in a world of burgeoning choice. It wasn’t that the Sopranos got significantly worse since 2002 (it was already starting to wane by then in my estimation), it’s that momentum for the fragmented world is accelerating and getting more and more fragmented all the time.

So let me be the first person I know to say this: (I’m not sure anyone else hasn’t, and I ‘fess up, I didn’t google it, because I didn’t want to know):

Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue is a GENIUS. Like Mark Cuban genius in terms of timing. He got out when the going was good. This poor sap Roger Goodell is about to not know what hit him. He’s worried about the Cincinnati Bengals % arrested – and while I don’t blame him, that’s going to be the least of his worries. The one thing that’s held on pretty steady is the NFL’s ratings clout. But their ratings too are eroding and it’s going to get worse, not better. And this is regardless of anything the NFL and the networks are doing in terms of packaging the product itself. It’s just math. It’s inevitable because of that math (limited free time, more choices, with choice escalating constantly).

I think of at least three things the NFL could or should be doing to stave this off (they can’t stop it, but they can optimize for the fact it is occurring), but don’t appear to be doing at all yet. This doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it, but I believe they probably are not thinking about it enough. Mr. Goodell, I may be reached at robert dot seidman @ gmail dot com. I’ll give you the three ideas for um… $3.8 million.