My First 100 Days as Sports Czar
Something a little different this week. Rate cases resume shortly.
Bill Simmons has been joking about instituting a sports czar for over 20 years. On his recent podcast with Chuck Klosterman, he brought it up again: it doesn’t seem that crazy anymore.
Then Klosterman, in the same part of the conversation, revealed the reason. The commissioners and powers that be work for the owners. Simmons then described the arc of every commissioner we’ve seen. They arrive caring about the sport and leave like Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather II. It’s not personal, it’s business.
So, I’ve accepted the appointment. Thank you, President Trump. No statute or confirmation hearing will be necessary. And I won’t turn out like Michael Corleone (and there won’t be a Godfather III in this saga). I will start my tenure by announcing five orders:
Order 1. Youth sports are 100% free.
To solve this problem over time, we gotta start at the bottom. A sports czar who starts with the pros has no hope.
In 1988, Spain was 4 years away from hosting the Olympics and their chances to medal were pretty weak. The Spanish government set up a nonprofit and asked its top corporations to each adopt a sport. Coca-Cola took track and field. Seat took cycling, Bimbo took tennis. Renfe, their national rail company, took canoeing. In the end, Spain won 22 medals in Barcelona, their best result ever. They’ve used this strategy with some of their soccer academies since.
What will I do? I’ll convince Congress to charter the American Sports Foundation. There will be 10 year terms and I’ll assign our top companies to sports.
Amazon gets football. They already own Thursday night and now they’ll finance Pop Warners all over the country from Hawaii to Maine.
Meta gets flag football. It’s growing at an exponential clip with boys and girls and will be at the LA Olympics in 2028. I’m making a big bet on this sport.
Apple gets soccer. They own MLS rights and now they’re supporting our 8-year-old soccer players too. Apple got us the iPhone, now help us find and nurture the American Messi.
Eli Lilly can take wrestling, a sport organized entirely by how much the athletes weigh. Exxon gets swimming, they must keep their eyes on the water.
Jensen and Nvidia get basketball. Alphabet takes volleyball, JPMorgan gets baseball and Microsoft gets softball. I can send you the full list if you’re curious.
Spain paid their corporate sponsors with airtime on the state broadcaster. We don’t have a state-owned broadcaster here but we have something even better.
Back in 1961, Congress gave the leagues an antitrust exemption. Without it, all 30 NBA teams would sell their games separately and compete with each other for the money. Today, the NBA sells one package and splits the check, the NFL is the same.
But here’s the part nobody mentions. The exemption only covers free, broadcast TV and it doesn’t cover cable and streaming. The NBA sold its rights last year to ESPN, Amazon and NBC/Peacock and a decent chunk of that package is behind a paywall. Congress is finally starting to ask about this, but Congress has never charged the leagues anything for the exemption and the leagues have spent 40 years applying it to cable and streaming, which didn’t exist in 1961.
My plan: charge them 1% of every US rights deal before an owner touches it.
Order 2. You can’t own a team and have a financial interest in a sportsbook.
The guy who the WNBA just sold the Connecticut Sun to also owns the Houston Rockets. His name is Tilman Fertitta and he also owned Golden Nugget Online Gaming, which he sold to DraftKings for $1.5B. And now, he’s one of DraftKings’ largest individual shareholders. DraftKings has an exclusive sportsbook agreement with the Houston Rockets. As an old friend of mine used to say, “dirty pool.”
He owns 8 casinos, a piece of the Wynn Resorts and he’s the US ambassador to Italy. This spring he bid $300M for Connecticut’s team. A group from Boston bid $325M and the Mohegan Tribe, which had owned the Sun since 2003, wanted to take the deal. The WNBA blocked it and said relocation is the board’s decision, not the team’s. A group from Hartford came in around the same number but the board approved Fertitta unanimously anyway… at the lowest price on the table. We don’t know why.
As your sports czar, I’m changing this now. Why did those bids lose? Buyer, price, market and reason must be published.
Order 3. Match it.
Any league that takes sportsbook money must fund gambling treatment at the same dollar amount. I’m not settling for a foundation or awareness campaign. I want the same exact number.
Recently a FanDuel customer named Terry Thompson wagered $18.5M over several years, took out a second mortgage, then a third and eventually lost his house. He had a FanDuel VIP host who sent him a reward. The reward was a cameo video from Bryce Harper that wished Thompson a happy Thanksgiving and even said hello to his son. (Harper went on the record and said he had no idea what the video was for and that FanDuel never told him. This somehow makes it worse.)
As your sports czar, I’m abolishing the job of VIP host, as of today.
Order 4. I’m dissolving the NCAA.
I’m not reforming here, no small measures. The athletes ARE employees. The word student-athlete is removed from the dictionary. It was a word that an NCAA lawyer invented to circumvent workers comp claims.
Conferences must make sense geographically. We can’t have the UCLA volleyball team travelling across the country every three weeks. That’s insane. I’m drawing the map myself. Maybe with a sharpie.
Order 5. Assorted gripes that I’m addressing.
Ticket pricing: the fees will now be in the same font size as the ticket price. No more BS. TV blackouts are now abolished and that only took 5 seconds.
Public order numbering for season ticket waitlists. It costs nothing.
Refs and game officials must explain their bad calls within a day, in their own words, without someone from comms/PR team in the room.
Concessions are now capped in any stadium or arena the public paid for. 10 fewer NBA games, starting in the fall. And MLS gets relegation. Make it work.
And then I would resign.
One interesting thing I realized when I wrote this: I didn’t invent a single power. They already exist. Congress handed the leagues the antitrust exemption back when JFK was president for free. It could put a price on that at any time it pleases.
MLB’s exemption came from an old Supreme Court decision that’s been challenged, but never successfully. In 1972 the Court said it was an aberration and ruled for the owners anyway, then told Congress to fix it if it cared. Congress has had 54 years and hasn’t done anything. The stadium bond loophole gets brought up every few years but somehow survives every time. Any state regulator could write a rule banning VIP hosts tomorrow morning. Every city that has a team has legitimate leverage over that team. More than they think.
So we actually don’t even need a sports czar. We need somebody who’s willing to use the power that’s already there.
Here in Connecticut, we just lost a major sports franchise to a man who sits on the board of a sportsbook. Our weak response was a pension fund idea that died instantly and our senator asking the Trump DOJ if they’ll take a look.
The Houston Comets will return to Texas next season and it’ll be a homecoming.