Fixing The Sports Calendar Part 1: The Problem
Big picture, the annual cycle of when America’s major sports seasons take place doesn’t make sense.
But by the end of this two-part blog blockbuster (Blogbuster? (woah, I should trademark that)), I’ll unveil a new and improved 12-month timeline that does.
Honestly, my enhanced version makes so much sense I kinda can’t believe it’s not already the reality.
Hang on though… If the Coronavirus has taught us anything (besides always make a beeline for the toilet paper in a retail panic-buying riot), it’s that if you want to solve a problem, you have to understand it first.
So that’s what Part 1 here is all about. Understanding this problem.
As any sports fanatic can attest to, some parts of the year feel overloaded with fresh athletic action while others seem starved for it. It’s been the unspoken sports status quo (Sportus quo? Eh, nah, not quite as strong a fake term as blogbuster. I mean c’mon, that’s borderline T-shirt worthy) for decades now.
In terms of how much live sports competition there is to watch from month to month, the overarching yearly schedule we have is simply too imbalanced for its own good.
To illustrate this notion, I’ve painstakingly put together this extremely detailed and aesthetically intricate chart. Behold… The Sports Calendar as we know it, version 1.0!
Ok fine so my visual art skills may be lacking a little. I’d hire someone else to make a prettier rendition, but that would require money, so… yeah. Excel sheet it is. Regardless, it gets the point across.
I’m defining the Sports Calendar to include the big four pro leagues and the two main college games because, if we’re being real here, despite soccer’s best efforts, these are still the only annual (sorry Olympics/World Cups) sports seasons (sorry event-structured UFC) that really matter in typical American life.
Also worth noting; yes, it’s true that drafts, trades, free agents, owner meetings and the like can all spark significant buzz for a sport completely outside of its season schedule. I’ll even grant you that enough offseason stories popping up in your news feeds can make it feel like your favorite sport is actually a full year-round affair in disguise.
But it’s not. Fundamentally. None of these sports are. That’s the reality of the Sports Calendar.
No sports stories can be more compelling than the ones that unfold before your very eyes; the game actually being played live and unscripted in front of thousands in the stands and millions around the world.
So that’s what we’re focused on. Because it’s what matters most.
If you’re a fan of two sports with overlapping season timeframes (the pro basketball/pro hockey combo is the prototype), you’re routinely deciding between the pair of leagues like a hammered college student deciding between a grilled cheese or a calzone to soak up the poison after a late night out.
You crave the unique satisfaction each option offers you, but no matter how bad you think you want both, attempting to fully enjoy more than only one of them is just too unhealthy and time-consuming to ever be worth the lifestyle repercussions.
Look, even a glance at the Sports Calendar will tell you that some months are much busier than others, but to effectively compare them all, I’ve devised a simple method that uses the calendar to measure the inequity objectively.
I call it the Sports Activity Index (SAI for short).
The goal of the SAI is to get a (very) basic idea of how much major sports activity is going on in a given month. The higher the SAI, the more live sports there are to watch.
Now it’s very complex, and I do apologize for the advanced mathematics techniques I’m about to break out from my glory days in the gifted program, but here’s how it works…
First, the Sports Calendar scoring key:
Every blank box (representing no activity) is worth 0 points.
Every green box (representing regular season activity) is worth 1 point.
Every red box (representing postseason activity) is worth 2 points.
(Even though there are fewer total games being played, I feel like the playoffs in any league matter to casual fans and occupy media coverage about twice as much as its regular season, so it’s worth double)
(Also, I just wanna keep the math stupidly simple. The gifted program was a long time ago)
Second, adjust the points accordingly when a box is only filled for a fraction of the month (ex. the NFL only ever stretches into the first week of February, so only the first quarter of that box is filled red, counting for 0.5 points towards February’s SAI).
Third, add up all the points and congratulations! Not only did you graduate fifth grade math with honors, but you’ve just successfully calculated a Sports Activity Index!
Does this statistical metric I just created based on a color-coded Excel sheet that I also just created hold up in academia?
I mean sure, yeah, as far as I care to be aware. All I know for sure is “Brad Kazanjian: mathematics pioneer” looks dope on my resume.
For your reading convenience, here’s how all 12 months stack up on the SAI (remember, the higher the score, the busier the sports month):
January – 6
December – 6
October – 5.5
May – 5
November – 5
April – 4.5
March – 4.25
February – 3.5
June – 3
September – 3
July – 1
August – 1
As my ‘data’ (those quotes should be on creatine for all the heavy lifting they’re doing) shows, the four lowest scoring months are all adjacent to one another, which represents an annual lull in the sports year that so many of us are painfully familiar with from June through September.
However, the real dead zone is in July and August.
During those 60 something days, that lull becomes an absolute sports desert where the only oasis comes in the form of three-plus-hour MLB snoozefests (I love baseball, I truly do. But I challenge you to find a single person in this country without an AARP card who’s genuinely excited about two and a half months of exclusively baseball).
This summertime hiatus straight up sucks for sports junkies and casual users alike. It always has.
We all know it’s coming every single year, yet there we are no later than mid-July clamoring for NFL training camp gossip or secondhand scouting reports on the new college football recruits just like we did the summer before.
There’s no good reason why things have to be this way.
And if you’re gonna come at me with some “But that’s the way we’ve always done it!” rationale, please, kindly close this tab now. Line-Stepper Sports isn’t for you.
The classic reasoning I’ve heard my whole life for leaving the summer just about devoid of sporting events is that too many people are traveling for vacations or otherwise busy doing things outside in the warm weather to bother keeping up with sports.
That would make some sense if we lived in like 1978. And I bet it actually did make sense in 1978 and all the rest of those pre-internet years when the Sports Calendar we’re still stuck with today was taking shape.
I mean think about it. The bar for a ‘fun’ time back in those days was astoundingly low. Skate around in an oval at a roller rink? Hitchhike and hope you don’t get murdered? Casual discrimination? Sad!
Thankfully, now we have the internet and the everlasting IV drip of media consumption that comes with it. I’m confident no matter what corner of the globe you might be vacationing at still includes Wi-Fi and a screen, which is all you need to keep up with the action of live sports in 2020 and beyond.
Furthermore, as a recovering lazy person myself, I reject the premise that just because the temperature rises all of a sudden everybody wants to spend every waking moment in the sun. Rain or shine, snow or sunflowers, the majority of us are still the same technology addicts we’ve always been.
Seriously, if I can instantaneously find a full Modern Warfare lobby playing Search and Destroy at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in May, then I guarantee any of these commissioners could find plenty of viewers to wet their league’s beak during primetime broadcasting slots in July and August.
Also, there’s this thing called nighttime where, get this, people sit around their TVs desperate for entertainment just like they do throughout the months in which they can see their breath outside.
This whole thing is founded on outdated logic from a bygone era of American culture.
It’s like how kids originally got summers off from school so they could spend that time working the fields to support the family farm or whatever, but then decades passed and our society evolved beyond the agrarian stage, so ever since they’ve been using their three months of scholastic freedom to play with super soakers or experiment with drugs. Depends on the age.
For the current world we live in, the Sports Calendar we have is simply obsolete. We’ve all been just going along with it all this time for three reasons:
Historical inertia
Change requires effort
Until this pandemic hit, nobody’s ever had the right formula of spare time and quarantine-induced hysteria to really scrutinize the issue
I think I’ve made my point. For whatever bogus reason you wanna pick, the summertime barely has any major sports going on. These select months are the key to revising the Sports Calendar to better serve the modern age.
(and in Part 2, believe me, the modern age gets served)