The most unexpected headline this week was the news that the Dallas Mavericks hadn’t been playing the national anthem before their home games. Of course, as soon as this made the news, things changed course and the anthem is back. Apparently, the NBA had softened the rule at the start of this season, but has now doubled back and clarified the expectation that all teams will play it before games. Some assorted thoughts on this:

While the US isn’t the ONLY country that plays the anthem before all professional and collegiate (and many high school) games, we’re in a pretty small minority. How did we get here? The tradition–as an occasional performance–dates back to the Civil War, but the current norm is decidedly more recent. I’ll defer to my UT colleague Michael Butterworth, who summarizes nicely in a pair of tweets:

Other leagues followed MLB's lead. In 1945, as the war ended, NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden declared, "The National Anthem should be as much a part of every game as the kick-off. We must not drop it simply because the war is over. We should never forget what it stands for."

— Michael Butterworth (@BurntO_Butterwo) February 10, 2021

So there’s that. I asked my small corner of Twitter if there were any examples of US teams similarly avoiding the anthem, as the Mavericks recently did. I didn’t get much, but historian Zach Bigalke pointed out that the Philadelphia Flyers abandoned the anthem amidst tensions during the Vietnam War, when many fans would leave their seats in a bit of protest. They replaced the song with God Bless America, won a Stanley Cup, and birthed a tradition. These days, it looks like the Flyers do play the anthem.

But for the most part, it appears to be standard fare, with a 70+ year history. The timing of the anthem hasn’t always been consistent: many NFL observers pointed out that, for many years, the anthem was played before the athletes took the field. Obviously, this changed before Colin Kaepernick’s now famous demonstration. Also on Twitter, historian Andrew McGregor noted that many Big 10 football teams would also play the song before players took the field, sometimes to the chagrin of visiting opponents.

So why might Mavericks owner Mark Cuban have signed off on this? Say what you will about Cuban, but he’s no dummy when it comes to business. My take was that it was somewhat calculated: fans offended by the absence of the song have likely already tuned out of the NBA and its increasingly visible social justice efforts. Thus, the Mavs decision might be taken as show of solidarity with their athletes and/or an alignment with fans who support the league’s progressive platforms.

And what does it all mean? Big picture…honestly, not a whole lot. But it’s another reminder that sports and politics are inextricably connected, as they have always been.

Roughly middle-aged in human terms, the academic field of sport management remains a bit maligned and misunderstood, sometimes fairly. Looked down upon by some academic peers, we’re also dismissed by many in the industry as nerds lacking a perspective from the trenches. (Sports industry types love the trenches.) While we professors are left to reckon with this dual-inferiority complex, the field is booming with students keen to enter an industry that has long enchanted them. And of course, there are plenty of young people outside of sport management who would love to work in sports and what follows applies to them as well.

To better serve my students, I have tried to help them articulate a response to a question they regularly encounter, seldom in good faith: why sport management, why not a business degree? My suggestion: sports are weird. There’s likely a more elegant way to phrase this, but I said it once a decade ago and it stuck. So again, sports are weird. Understanding this not only justifies a dedicated course of study in sport, but more importantly, is fundamental to long term success and career advancement in the industry.

So what do I mean here? Simply put, to see sports as directly interchangeable with other business sectors or industries is a perspective that is somewhere between limited and wrongheaded. (And to my peers whose departments treat the field as “management with sports examples”: do better.)

Some examples of the weirdness may help:

1. The “rebuilding year” and consumer loyalty. I would never buy a product I knew was bad just because I love the brand, letting them off the hook for a “rebuilding year.” No one has ever said “Oh yeah, the new Camry is known to explode when you hit 55MPH, but come on, Toyota’s in a rebuilding year.” Yet the Chicago Cubs have one of the most fervent fanbases in the world, most of whom stuck it out through a rebuilding century. I am still a Raiders fan. This is weird.
   
2. The nature of competition. Yes, franchises and schools compete against each other on the field, but are they really competitors in the traditional, market sense of the term? McDonald’s wouldn’t mind putting Burger King out of business, but FC Barcelona needs Real Madrid. When the Cleveland Browns left town for Baltimore, it was the Pittsburgh Steelers who led the charge to reestablish their rival franchise. Best Buy certainly didn’t do the same when Circuit City went under. We’ll leave the discussion of professional leagues and the NCAA operating as cartels for another day.
   
3. The oft-used examples of BIRGing and CORFing. (Basking in reflected glory and cutting off reflected failure.) In simpler terms, the sports fan pronoun game: “WE WON!” There are plenty of actors and musicians and I’m a fan of, but I don’t take partial credit when they win an award or make something great.
   
4. Locating the product. Are professional franchises in the live entertainment business? The broadcast or digital media space? The service sector? The clothing and retail sectors? Yes. And more. Jim Rooney succinctly captures one version of this in the biography he wrote about his father Dan, the late owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers: Labor deals in professional sports are unique because players are both the labor force and the product. Maintaining labor peace means maintaining the product. I might add that players these days also have a role in the PR functions of the organization. A TV show or a Big Mac can’t tweet, but your star player can.
   
5. Let’s not even get started on professional team values and the mockery they make of traditional valuation metrics and multipliers…

6. In his recent book Post-Corona, Scott Galloway distinguishes between two fundamental business models:

One, a company can sell stuff for more than the cost of making it. Apple takes about $400 worth of circuits and glass, imbues it with the promise of status and sex appeal through brilliant advertising, and charges me $1,200 for an iPhone. Two, a company can give stuff away–or sell it below cost–and charge other companies for access to its product: the consumer’s behavioral data. NBC hires Jerry Seinfeld to write a TV show, films dozens of episodes on a studio lot in LA made to look like a sanitized version of Manhattan, then beams it out for free to anyone with a subscription to watch. But every eight minutes, NBC interrupts the witty banter with several minutes of ads, for which it charges the advertisers, who are its actual customers. The product is of course, you.

But Galloway also notes that some businesses combine both. His example? The NFL. The league generates revenue from selling tickets and other things to consumers, but also sells access to consumers to advertisers and sponsors, without cannibalizing itself. Relatively speaking: weird.

The list of examples could go on, but the big picture is what’s important. The aim isn’t to over-romanticize or over-complicate what makes the industry unique, but to identify and articulate the ways in which it IS unique. From there, a reasonable course of inquiry–and hopefully, action–should begin to manifest itself. If you build it get weird, they will come.

Postscript

1. Thanks to Seth Kessler, Brian Mills, and Matt Bowers for their feedback on early drafts. Matt gets extra credit for letting me bounce this off him for the past 10 years.
   
2. As they say, there is really nothing new under the sun. The sport academics reading this may find many parallels to Laurence Chalip’s essential article, “Toward a Distinctive Sport Management Discipline” (Journal of Sport Management, 2006). Chalip’s concern is for academia, not industry, but the gist is quite similar. Not surprising, given I took several graduate courses with him and he gets credit for shaping much of the way I think about these things. What I can’t quite wrap my head around is that I somehow never came across “Toward a…” until a couple years ago. This is embarrassing, but also a testament to his teaching and wisdom: I somehow lifted the idea from him without even being directly exposed to it. Folks with academic library access should be able to find the article easily. Get in touch if you need help. Here’s the abstract:

The current malaise over sport management’s place and future as an academic discipline provides a useful basis for envisioning the needs and directions for the field’s growth and development. The field’s development requires two complementary streams of research: one that tests the relevance and application of theories derived from other disciplines, and one that is grounded in sport phenomena. The legitimations that sport advocates advance for sport’s place on public agendas are useful starting points for research that is sport focused. The five most common current legitimations for sport are health, salubrious socialization, economic development, community development, and national pride. The value of sport in each case depends on the ways that sport is managed. Factors that facilitate and that inhibit optimization of sport’s contribution to each must be identified and probed. Identifying and probing those factors will be aided by research that confronts popular beliefs about sport, and by research that explores sport’s links to other economic sectors. The resulting research agenda will foster development of a distinctive sport management discipline.

I launched this site in the early days of the pandemic, making good on a long-standing plan to write on a non-academic platform. Of course, in those days, it was also a nice antidote to the hours of doom scrolling. While I remain proud of the pace I maintained in the early days of the site, it was simply too much to keep up with as the fall semester came to a close.

Today, a month into 2021 and about a year into the pandemic, I’m looking forward to a return to regular posting, albeit with some changes. I don’t think readers need me to keep up with the day to day of the sports world; there are plenty of outlets for that, and much of the work done by my early link posts is now covered in the site’s companion newsletter, The SportsThink Weekly Review. The Weekly Review collects my favorite sports reading of the week, as well as some current events and other odds and ends. Issue 33 goes out this Friday and I’m proud to say that other than a short winter break, I haven’t missed a week since the launch. (And this may explain losing steam on the blog!) I’d be honored if you’d subscribe. It’s free and all I ask is that you consider sharing with other folks who may enjoy it.

So what can readers expect? More longer form writing, hopefully at a rate of 2-3 pieces a month, if not weekly. And some more guest contributions as well (writers, get in touch!). I’ll be editing the archive, focusing on leaving up the longer and more insightful pieces from the past year. I’m long overdue for tags on posts, so those will be coming as well. I’m also working on some permanent pages that will collect links on relevant topics, more on those in short order. And who knows, maybe some other good stuff?

Thanks for reading, I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you once again!

I’m excited to revive the blog with this guest contribution from Alec S. Hurley, a doctoral candidate in Physical Culture and Sports Studies at the University of Texas.

Lost amidst the ongoing chaos of a turbulent and exhausting election in the United States was a rare display of senate bipartisanship. In the early afternoon of November 17, 2020 senators unanimously passed The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act. The bill, named for Grigory Rodchenkov, who helped expose systematic state-sponsored doping practices in Russia, would make it “unlawful to knowingly influence a major international sport competition by use of a prohibited substance or method.” Less than two months after being officially signed into law, news of a decades long, Russian backed, doping coverup in international biathlon was revealed by the New York Times. The passage of this bill, in what will hopefully be an Olympic year, creates a series of interesting problems for a new presidential administration in the United States. The Biden/Harris agenda, focused on resuming global cooperation, could be complicated by legislation like the Rodchenkov Act, which doubles-down the ‘American First’ policies of the previous administration.

Origins:

The new law was born nearly three years ago, at a meeting of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, where lawmakers consider a broad range of US-European issues. Early drafts of the bill worked through the U.S. House of Representatives in late October of 2019 before facing minimal opposition en route to unanimous passage through the U.S. Senate in mid-November 2020.

Among the reasons for the bill’s origins was a long-simmering dispute between the Trump administration and the World Anti-Doping Agency over funding and perceived influence. A transactional approach to international relations was a defining trait of the Trump administration and the US/WADA relationship was no different. As of 2019, the United States contributed $2.7 million to WADA. Additionally, because the IOC matches each government’s contribution, the total size of the US-generated funds sat at roughly $5.5 million, which accounted for roughly 7% of the organization’s overall budget. The general concern for the United States government was that their investment was not being met with the rigor they believed was necessary. Officials from the US Office of National Drug Control Policy often cited the need for fairness and a level playing field for American athletes in international competition. Perceptions of unfairness in the United States escalated rapidly between the 2016 and delayed 2020 Olympiads following the reinstatement of Russia’s anti-doping agency and athletics federations in 2018. With an Olympic host site on the horizon, the United States believes that it is owed the right to take the lead on such matters.

What can the law do?

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