It is at this point, over 1600 words into this blog behemoth, we get to the real fun: solving the problem.

The mission is to shift around the season schedule of one or more of the non-baseball sports to bridge the gap between the packed late fall/winter and the baron summer, thus resulting in an annual sports agenda that’s balanced enough to satisfy the modern era.

But which of the leagues can be our Sports Calendar Goldilocks?

Right off the bat, both college football and basketball are stuck where they’re at due to their reliance on student athletes.

Although, thinking about it, I really wouldn’t put it past the NCAA to hold players captive on campus in the dead of summer to work for free like indentured servants if they thought they could make an extra buck. But realistically, they couldn’t get away with it.

You could try to shift one of the two sports to later in the school year to create some opportunities for other leagues to move around more easily, but I don’t see that working either.

The historic tradition of college football wouldn’t tolerate a transition out of the fall, plus their place in the middle of the Friday/Saturday/Sunday American football pact with high schools and the NFL is too entrenched in Americana to mess with (seriously, I think there’s a passage in the Constitution decreeing this arrangement as law).

I guess college basketball could theoretically get away with pushing itself back by a single month, but that would leave us with April Madness, which is just as gross to type as it is to say out loud, so that’s a hard no.

As the premier league of the most popular American sport, the NFL possesses the most power to alter the Sports Calendar with a schedule change, but I also can’t see that happening.

For one thing, they likewise have their own designated day to maintain in the whole autumn weekend football culture contract thing (there really needs to be an official name for that).

But more importantly, I refuse to entertain any form of football where inclement winter weather can’t make an impact on the game. My distaste for unnecessary domed stadiums is already well documented, so I’m sure not interested in summertime NFL games where humidity and rainstorms replace frost and blizzards. It’s just plain wrong.

Now things get interesting…

As I eluded to in Part 1, the NBA and NHL share almost identical season structures. Both start in October and run their 82-game regular seasons into mid-April, at which point the playoffs commence and continue until mid-June.

However, as far as I can tell, only the NHL is really tied to playing during that particular portion of the calendar in any meaningful way.

It’s only been in existence since 2008, but hockey’s outdoor Winter Classic games are immensely important for the league to maintain because they are:

1. Objectively cool as hell

2. The only thing the NHL has been able to pull off since the glowing puck that so much as raises the eyebrows of non-hockey fans

Of course, you’d be hard pressed to find stadiums in a climate that could support open-air hockey in the warmer half of the year, so a season that runs through all of the coldest months is only logical.

It also just makes sense that professional hockey happens during the same time of year when kids and amateurs are grabbing sticks and skates of their own to carve up their local frozen ponds.

It feels right.

You know what doesn’t feel right?

Professional basketball playing out its regular season while the temperature seldom eclipses 60 and park courts across America are regularly held hostage by either winter snow or spring rain.

It happens every year. Right when the NBA comes back and everyone gets bit by the basketball bug and is itching to play pickup, your only option to find a game is to head to your friendly neighborhood gym/rec center and hope to god the stars align for you and your buddies.

But at least in my experience, 9 times out of 10, they don’t.

If you live in any decently populated area and plan on pulling up to an indoor court during any period of widespread hoops fever at any sort of normal hour, this is more or less the experience you’re in for…

You don’t even get both feet in the gym door before you notice the small army of guys too short, pale, or routinely intoxicated to play organized ball (not hating, I’m two out of the three myself) eagerly shuffling around the court’s perimeter. All awaiting their chance on the floor like a sitcom kid waiting for dad to get home.

Before you have time to scan the crowd for familiar faces or dap anybody up, you’d better be laser focused on getting you and your boys (FYI, if you’re trying to go solo/free agent style, you have virtually no chance of seeing game action. Don’t even bother shedding your sweats) in the ‘got next’ line as fast as possible. Doing anything else is only prolonging your wait time that would already at best rival a trendy downtown restaurant on a Friday night (y’know, back when people could do that sort of thing).

And take a strong mental note of who’s in front of you and who’s behind you in line, because every last slide-wearing, bargain bin 2K MyPlayer in that place will gladly take the opportunity to skip ahead of you if you give them the chance.

Then, assuming you finally get in a game, you’d better win. Or else you just stood around for the better part of an hour to take a handful of stiff jumpers (no, you beautiful idiot, you didn’t get any warmup reps) and do it all over again.

I’m not even gonna get into the random badminton setup that’s inexplicably taking up half the hardwood no matter what time you show up or the hypochondriac guard calling his own fouls like clockwork every time he blows a layup.

It’s not fun. At the very least, there’s a whole lot of obstacles standing between you and fun that wouldn’t be there if the pickup population could disperse between indoor and outdoor courts when they’re in their peak balling mood.

Now that might seem like a small issue in the grand scheme of the Sports Calendar, but despite any hyperbole in the picture I just painted, I think it’s significant. Watching anything becomes exponentially more interesting when it’s something you can frequently do in your real life (even if guarding the heavy-breathing business major isn’t quite the same experience as d-ing up Kevin Durant).

Suffice to say, basketball being played by professionals when it’s hardest for non-professionals to play doesn’t make logical sense to me.

Couple that notion with the reality that there’s nothing concretely forcing the NBA’s schedule into lockstep with the NHL’s and I think we’ve found our Goldilocks.

The fix for our archaic Sports Calendar is surprisingly simple…

Push back the start of the NBA season by nine weeks.

This is how the big picture of the NBA’s new season would play out…

Season tip-off: Christmas Day

It’s always been huge for the NBA that basketball owns this holiday, and in the Sports Calendar version 2.0, they still will.

Plus, if we’re being honest about the current state of affairs, 75% of even legitimate NBA fans don’t take the season seriously until they’re tearing up holiday wrapping paper anyway.

This way, the season gets off to a running start with five consecutive marquee matchups and people are getting invested in the season right from game 1, not game 20-something.

All-Star Weekend: Mid-April

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the traditional mid-February slot, but there’s also nothing wrong with a potential mid-April slot. Call it a wash.

Playoffs: Late June – Late August

This is the juicy part.

By moving their entire playoffs completely out of NHL territory, the NBA would completely eliminate the dreaded summer lull for sports fans, and in the process accomplish something currently impossible for the association while they’re under the thumb of the Sports Calendar version 1.0…

With meaningless MLB games and NFL preseason matchups as virtually their only competition, the NBA would have an absolute stranglehold on sports fans’ attention from the day after the Stanley Cup is raised until the Larry O’Brien is being hoisted over two full months later.

I’m trying to find a parallel stretch of Sports Calendar dominance to compare it to, but I can’t. Check it for yourself and you’ll see what I’m seeing.

The financial and brand benefits of the NBA season annually peaking at the perfect time to become essentially the only show in town for more than a sixth of the year are untold and go without saying.

(Not to mention this added balancing benefit; The move would clear the coast for the NHL’s playoffs, allowing hordes of casual fans to adequately appreciate arguably the most consistently compelling postseason of any of these sports)

Legitimately, now that I lay it all out, I can’t believe they’re not already doing this. This is an untapped goldmine for the NBA.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Draft Night: Early September

Still just a few weeks after the Finals as it is now, a weeknight draft in early September wouldn’t have as much competition as you might think.

The NFL and NCAAF would have just kicked off, true, but as long as the NBA doesn’t draft on a Thursday, they can avoid any football game drawing viewers away from their product.

Those are the big event changes, but if you’re curious about where any other NBA season milestone would fall in this new season schedule, just look up where it is now and add nine weeks to it. Like I said, the simpler the math, the better.

Far be it from me to praise myself, but this is a great idea.

An NBA season schedule that runs from Christmas morning to the tail end of the summer is all it takes to fix our horribly uneven Sports Calendar.

Not to mention, using the current forced basketball sabbatical to permanently slide the league season into this arrangement could be a serious (if not the only) silver lining to this horrific pandemic.

I promised a new and improved 12-month timeline in Part 1, and I’m a man of my word. Behold… The Sports Calendar version 2.0!

I’ll admit on the surface it doesn’t look drastically different than the original version, but the numbers don’t lie:

Version 1.0 SAI variance = 2.75

Version 2.0 SAI variance = 0.99

What does that mean?

(well, for one thing, it means I shattered my oath to simplicity and broke out some bona fide mathematics on this column)

Essentially, it means my Sports Calendar 2.0 here is more than twice as balanced as version 1.0.

Full disclosure, I’ve racked my brain trying to think of legitimate counterarguments for adopting version 2.0 as the new norm, but I can’t come up with any that couldn’t be solved with a little effort and intuition. On every level, the benefits of a switch to the Sports Calendar 2.0 significantly outweigh any potential drawbacks.

That being said, if you have any real reasons for dissension, I’d love to hear them (*cough* comments section *cough*). And if you don’t, ask around.

Especially in this sports-less time, fixing our flawed Sports Calendar has every right to be the primary topic of discussion for sports fans and media pundits alike. 

Listen, I’m aware that we’ve been doing things the way we have for most of a century and, despite all the issues I take with it, the wide world of sports has been just fine with the Sports Calendar 1.0. 

But that’s all we’ve been: just fine

It is abundantly clear that we could do better. So we should do better. Simple as that.