It’s nearly springtime in the Houston area.   That means it’s time to start cleaning-out your garage and clear-out anything you won’t need for the upcoming summer.

For the Houston Rockets, this year’s garage sale has started early and will continue in the weeks ahead.  By March 25 (the NBA’s trade deadline), it’s possible that most people will not recognize the Houston Rockets basketball team roster from just one year ago. 

With the team mired in a 16-game losing streak (and counting), this season’s Houston Rockets are perfecting the art of “tanking” to improve the team’s draft position once this season mercifully ends.   Houston hasn’t won an NBA game since February 4! 

As of the writing of this article, the Rockets have only 11 wins this season (11-25) and have dropped into the #3 draft selection spot.  Only Minnesota (8 wins) and Detroit (10 wins) are ahead of Houston as the competition heats up for the worst record in the NBA (and the statistically-likely #1 pick in the next player draft). 

For a city whose basketball team has not endured a losing season since 2005, this woeful 2021 version of the Houston Rockets has been surprising to fans accustomed to winning.   Rockets fans have been famous in preserving the team’s “Clutch City” mantra after winning back-to-back NBA championships in the mid-1990’s.

How did the Rockets go from a perennial playoff contender (44-26 last year) to a bottom dweller in one year? 

* James Harden demanded out.  The Rockets acquired the high-scoring Harden (aka “The Beard”) from Oklahoma City in 2012.  The management of the team built a squad around Harden’s fast-break mentality.  The Rockets became the first prolific 3-point shooting team in the league.  If the team’s shooting percentage hovered around 40%, it made sense to take that many long-distance shots.  However, in the playoffs, the other teams had time to adjust their defenses to make it harder for the Rockets’ best scorer (Harden) to get as many points.  The Rockets made the playoffs every year while Harden was in Houston, but only advanced to the Western Division finals twice during the James Harden years.  After last season, James Harden demanded to be traded.  A few weeks into the 2021 season, his request for a trade came through as Harden was shipped to the Brooklyn Nets.

* The long-time coach was released.  Though many of us observers would say that former Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni was more of a professional babysitter/cheerleader than a true “X’s and O’s” teacher, the Rockets’ coach and his star player (James Harden) got along swimmingly.  The coach rarely tried to discipline either Harden or other Rockets players – both on the court or off.  At the end of last season, the Rockets cut him (and his $5 million annual salary) loose, and D’Antoni resurfaced as an assistant coach with the Brooklyn Nets (sound familiar?). 

* Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey resigned.  The general manager is in charge of draft picks, free agent signings, and payroll for the team.  Though Morey was quite good at some tasks, he was (my opinion) a “deal junkie” who often made roster changes during the season just for the sake of tinkering with the line-up.  His draft picks are now either out of the league or had been traded (by Morey, of course) to other teams (where some have flourished).  Daryl Morey was hired to a similar position in Philadelphia and is off to a great start.  His 76ers are currently atop the NBA Eastern Conference.    

Dallas Cowboys fans should know this tune.  Sing along to the “Ballad of Jerry Jones”!

Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jer’

Played Razorback football with the Hogs up there.

Then one day, after graduating school

He poked holes in the ground right into a gas pool

Methane, that is…Contract guaranteed…Take or pay!

Well the next thing you know, Jer’s a multi-millionaire.

His kinfolk said, “Time to move away from there –

Dallas, Texas is the place you ought to be”

So he bought the Dallas Cowboys in the 1980’s.

For $140 million – worth $6 billion today!!!

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerral Wayne Jones wasn’t born rich. Jerry’s parents moved to Little Rock, Arkansas when the lad was just three years old.  His parents ran a local grocery store until Jerry graduated from high school in 1960.

Once Jerry Jones went to college in Fayetteville to play football as a 185-pound offensive lineman for the Arkansas Razorbacks, his parents moved north to Springfield, Missouri where his father (Pat) built a successful life insurance business.   

When Jerry returned from college in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he was named Executive Vice President of his father’s insurance company.  He would return to Fayetteville to obtain a Master’s degree before heading into business for himself in 1970.  

In 1981, Jerry Jones and his oil and gas partner Mike McCoy (a petroleum engineer) formed an oil and natural gas entity called Arkoma Production Company.  In 1982, Arkoma obtained (for a reported $15 million) thousands of acres of leases from a natural gas utility named Arkla, Inc.  In return for Arkoma’s agreement to drill and develop hundreds of lower risk/moderate reward developmental wells into a “you almost can’t miss” region of prolific natural gas reserves in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma (hence the company name “Arkoma”), the same natural gas pipeline utility (Arkla) agreed to purchase the newly discovered production.   

In what would turn out to be extremely fortunate for Jones’ future professional football interests, the gas purchase contract between Arkoma and Arkla called for Arkoma’s daily natural gas production to be purchased by the pipeline company at a percentage of the wells’ daily flow volumes (called “take-or-pay”).  Within a few years, the pipeline’s market for Arkoma’s pricey natural gas had declined, and the agreement’s “take-or-pay” clause kicked-in.    

By 1986, Arkla decided to end the deal and wrote a check for $175 million to completely buy-out Arkoma Production Company.  As a 50% owner, Jerry Jones had quickly become quite wealthy.  He and his partner, Mike McCoy, would start anew in the energy business once again. 

Just two years later in 1988, Jerry Jones would learn that the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys were for sale. Though he would later state that he was initially only interested in a portion of the football team, Jerry Jones would purchase the Dallas Cowboys football team ($65 million) and their home stadium (Texas Stadium) for another $75 million. The $140 million price tag involved Jones leveraging everything he owned in order to buy the team. 

Risk (whether it was father’s life insurance business, his years in the energy business, and now pro football) had become all too familiar to the 47-yea...

As a graduate of a Louisiana high school and two state universities, the current stories about the athletics program at the state’s flagship Large State University (LSU) are quite troubling to me and thousands of other Tiger fans in many ways. 

Another part of me is glad that some much-needed sunlight is finally shining on some very ugly open wounds.

For those who haven’t been following the past week’s sports news, an investigation was authorized last fall following a major newspaper’s report about misconduct involving a few former LSU football players.  The digging has recently revealed a heretofore undiscovered a bigger stain on the university’s athletics program. 

Several years before he was fired in September, 2016 for being a stubborn leader with a quickly fading on-field record, former LSU head football coach Les Miles (whose attorney still denies any wrongdoing by his client) was implicated in a number of incidents.  He purportedly utilized his powerful position (the highest paid state employee in Louisiana) to provide “help” to several college co-eds working as interns in the athletics department.   Most of those female students didn’t want as much attention as the former football coach was apparently seeking to provide. 

This recently uncovered report about the former football coach had been neatly tucked away in the off-campus legal offices of LSU’s outside legal counsel.  Due to “security” (wink, wink) reasons, not a single copy of the 2013 Les Miles settlement report was kept on the school’s campus as investigators had been searching for facts regarding a more recent story (2020) about a few misbehaving college football players at LSU.

If those two events in the football program weren’t bad enough, the LSU men’s basketball program (which has enjoyed a very good season and will likely qualify for the NCAA March Madness tournament field) remains under scrutiny, too.  Last August, the LSU basketball program was reportedly placed under an investigation into several alleged recruiting violations by current basketball coach Will Wade.   In 2019, it was revealed that Coach Wade was overheard (via an FBI wiretap) offering a prospective recruit more than simply a scholarship to play hoops for the Tigers. 

What should we make of all this mess in Baton Rouge?

First, it’s important to start with the Les Miles saga.  Les (once known affectionately as “The Mad Hatter” due to his oversized cap) came to LSU after a successful tenure as head coach at Oklahoma State University.  In 2005, Miles was asked to fill the large shoes of former LSU head coach, Nick Saban.  Saban left LSU to try his hand in coaching the NFL Miami Dolphins.  Unfortunately for LSU football fans, Nick Saban left Miami after two seasons and returned to coaching college football at the University of Alabama. 

While in Stillwater with Okie State, we were reminded this past week that Les Miles had been actively involved in the school’s “hostess” program in addition to coaching football.  A group of lovely OSU female hostesses help escort potential football players and their families around the university campus during fall football weekends in Stillwater.  Though the “hostess” program had been in place for many years before Les Miles arrived, it re-surfaced this week that that Coach Miles might have been more enthusiastically involved in selecting the young ladies for the program than your average head football coach.

In a report originally released back in 2013,

There is good news coming for college basketball fans soon!  Both the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments will begin in about two more weeks.

Given that the tournaments were cancelled last year as the pandemic shut down sports (and much of our lives), this is, indeed, great news for sports fans!

This year, though, there are quite a bit of unusual facets to the Big Dance to be aware of.  For the men, all tournament games will be played in and around Indianapolis, Indiana.   The women will have their entire tournament played in the San Antonio, Texas area. 

From the first round to cutting down the nets at the end, the entire tournament will be played in those two great American cities.

That’s the good news.

The rules, though, for this tournament are quite unique.  The NCAA has published guidelines for both the men’s tournament and women’s tournament.  In a nutshell, let me summarize the most important aspects below:

* Every participating conference should have the opportunity for at least one team in the championship field.  That isn’t anything new as the NCAA keeps the smaller conferences happy with at least one team being put into the field to play a supposed “giant” power school.  Those match-ups always make the first weekend so much fun!* Once the tournament bracket is finalized and released, teams will not be reseeded, nor will the bracket change.  This would become important in the event that your favorite team should come down with a COVID outbreak in week #2 of the tournament.  The remaining healthy opponent would win that upcoming game by forfeit.  Moral of the story – you have to beat all of your opponents and COVID to win this year! * If a league champion team cannot participate, the league may designate a replacement team before the start of the tournament.  Though this might seem highly unlikely, the NCAA is trying to give every conference a chance to have a participant. * If an “at large” team (a highly rated team which didn’t win its own conference) cannot participate, the NCAA will utilize one of the “First Four” teams (#65, 66, 67, and 68) to take the place of the at-large team(s).  As a result, the NCAA would then put (theoretically) team #69 into the “First Four” group of teams. 

Before we proceed, the tournament field of 64 teams is a product of math.  To win the championship with 64 teams, the winner must go 6-0 to take home the trophy (64 teams becomes 32, then 16, 8, 4, and 2).  This is normally played over three week period with two games played every weekend. 

Since the NCAA usually has 32 conference champions, those winners are automatically entered into the field.  In many cases, the regular season league champion does not win the end-of-season conference championship, though. 

Let the howling begin!

If a regular season champ fails to win its conference tournament, they are still eligible to enter the field by being one of the 32 (in normal years) “at large” teams.  Those teams, though, are chosen by an elite (translated – politically connected) group of people assigned by the NCAA.  They are usually athletics directors and former coaches and a few assorted ringers. 

As the number of conferences has kept increasing, there are a number of unhappy “left out” college basketball teams which are omitted from the tournament field following Selection Sunday. 

A chorus of “boo hoos” is heard every single year.

If you are a long-time fan of the NBA’s Boston Celtics, you are accustomed to seeing a competitive basketball team on the court nearly every season.

Historically, the Celtics have won an incredible 17 National Basketball Association championships.  Legendary coach and General Manager Red Auerbach built a basketball empire on the parquet floor of the Boston Garden.

The Bill Russell-era Celtics totally dominated the sport during the 1950’s and 1960’s by winning the league in 11 out of 13 seasons. 

In the 1970’s, Boston took home two more NBA titles led by John Havlicek and a cast of unselfish contributors.   The Larry Bird-era Celtics of the 1980’s would see Boston win three more NBA crowns as the team never missed the playoffs during that decade.    

Since 1987, the Boston Celtics have morphed back into a merely average NBA franchise.  The 1990’s brought long stretches of non-playoff years for the team. The last championship banner raised in Boston Garden came in 2008 during the Paul Pierce era. 

There is one bridge linking the Boston Celtics’ championship glory years of the 1980’s and their most recent championship team in 2008. 

His name is Danny Ainge. 

Coming out of high school in Oregon in 1977, Danny Ainge was a true two-sport athlete.  In addition to signing a basketball scholarship to play for Brigham Young University, Ainge was also considered to be a hot baseball prospect.  While enrolled at BYU, Ainge would play basketball for the college team in the winter but signed a contract to play during the spring and summer for professional baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays.  He would make the team’s major league roster as a utility player in 1979. 

Ainge completed a stellar college basketball career at BYU in 1981 and averaged nearly 25 points per game as a senior.  When the Boston Celtics selected Danny Ainge in the second round of the 1981 NBA player draft, the Celtics would later buy-out his baseball contract in Toronto. 

Danny Ainge had decided to make his mark in professional basketball with none other than the world-famous Boston Celtics.

A three-point shooting specialist, Danny Ainge became a key performer on the Celtics’   championship teams of the 1980’s.   It didn’t hurt to be playing on the same team with future Hall-of-Famers Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson, and Bill Walton, either!    

After his playing days ended, Danny Ainge entered the television broadcasting booth and provided color commentary for NBA games on Turner Network Television for one season. 

He then tried his hand at coaching.  In his late 30’s, the relatively young Ainge would take over the struggling Phoenix Suns in 1996 and lead the team to the NBA playoffs in each of his three seasons as head coach.  The Suns won 60% of their games with Ainge as the team’s coach.

Suddenly, though, Danny Ainge quit the NBA coaching profession.  Ainge, a lifelong Mormon, decided to walk away from basketball after he began to feel as if he was a hypocrite.

“I just lost touch with everything,” he said. “All my life I’d preached balance and priorities, but basketball had consumed me. There are so many wonderful things going on in life — family l...

We’re just about at the one year mark since the COVID 19 virus started to affect everyday life in America and abroad.  One year later, we are ready for it to vamoose.  Pronto!

As I pondered how many times we all have been wrong on so many issues (both pessimistically and optimistically), it might be interesting to stop and assess how things have changed in various sports during the past twelve months. 

NFL – Just like last year at this time, the Super Bowl has been played and the NFL was able to complete their entire season.   The NFL, though, had the benefit of about six months of time to watch and learn from other sports whose seasons were already in play.   The NFL’s biggest changes had to do with little or no fans allowed in the stands during the games.  Since football fans are packed into stadiums like sardines in many locations, the thought of sitting next to a total stranger who may or may not be spreading the virus was never a good idea last fall. 

Financially, the pro football league and its players had agreed before this season to spread any 2020 pandemic-related revenue shortfalls over a four year period beginning this fall in 2021.   The league left the 2020 salary cap at $198.2 million, though. 

The NFL and the players agreed that, for 2021, each team’s salary cap was projected to be no less than $175 million.  As it turned out, the new 2021 NFL salary cap was announced late last week to be set at $180 million for the upcoming season.   

One report projected that the NFL would lose about $5 billion in 2020 due to the inability to host their historical average number of fans in the stadiums.  Teams lost revenue from tickets, parking, concessions, and sales of game-day trinkets at team stores.  Some teams (like Dallas and Las Vegas) were expecting upwards of a 50% drop in team revenue while smaller-market teams such as Buffalo or Cincinnati might experience a 33% decline in home team revenues.

SwampSwami’s NFL Report Card: B  The NFL, with a couple of early bumps, was able to play and conclude its season during the normal period.  Though the league had no preseason games (yes!), the level of play in the first few weeks was a little shaky (as expected).  COVID catastrophes were averted, but the empty stadiums were a bummer.  Nicely done, NFL!

NBA and NHL – First, we should cut the professional basketball and hockey leagues a lot of slack when evaluating how they have performed over the past year.  Though professional sports leagues had dealt with national emergencies before (such as the San Francisco World Series earthquake in the 1980’s or the aftermath of 9/11), the unknowns about the Coronavirus outbreak made everything dicey.  Wisely, both the NBA and NHL called a “time out” to assess the players’ medical risks on whether to continue play after 3/4 of their respective regular seasons had been completed.   

NBA – The pro basketball league suspended play on March 11, 2020 and didn’t resume again until July 30.  The league spent millions of dollars to set-up a “bubble” basketball arena environment in Orlando’s Disney World where the eligible teams would play their remaining games without any fans.  Though players were (essentially) playing in an empty barn, the NBA did a very good job of creating an illusion that the games were being played with fans watching, home-team logos on the court, organ music playing,

When people discuss sports figures who might be the “Greatest of All Time” (GOAT), names like football’s Tom Brady, boxing legend Mohammed Ali, hockey’s Wayne Gretsky, and golfer Arnold Palmer come to mind in their respective men’s sports.   

In basketball, most fans might pick Michael Jordan but the younger set might go for LeBron James.  Baseball’s GOAT is nearly impossible to determine, but many of us would put Willie Mays at or near the top of that list.  For women’s sports, golfer Annika Sorenstam leads the pack while the tennis debate rages between Serena Williams, Steffi Graf, and several other legends.

On Wednesday morning, one of the most important people in the radio broadcasting industry passed away at age 70 after a one year battle with Stage 4 lung cancer. 

Rush Limbaugh wasn’t the first person to work in talk radio.  However, over the past three decades, Rush firmly established himself as the literal King Kong of Talk Radio – whether you loved him or loathed him.   More than 600 radio stations nationwide now have a gigantic hole to fill in their three-hour midday programming schedule.

Sadly, a majority of the mainstream media reports immediately “rushed” (pun intended) to remind everyone about a few of the stumbles which Rush Limbaugh had over his 31-year national radio career.  That negativity was, to some expect, overblown and, in many cases, downright cruel.

This is a man who was on the air for three hours a day, five days per week, for 50 weeks a year for 31 years.  That’s 23,250 hours of (as Rush might say) broadcast excellence.  Detractors had plenty of opportunity to cherry pick their issues with Limbaugh. 

Of course, my website is primarily a sports site.  Rush Limbaugh also loved sports!  He played high school football at Cape Girardeau’s Central High School.  One of his first local radio gigs in southeastern Missouri was broadcasting high school football games.  Using the stage names of Rusty Sharpe or Jeff Christy, Rush would laugh years later as he proudly admitted that he had been fired from several music disc jockey jobs during his late teens and twenties.  Most every career radio announcer has suffered that same fate due to bad ratings or a station format change.  It just happens.

“Bachelor” Jeff Christy became the morning DJ for a Pittsburgh area radio station in the early 1970’s.  Eventually, he was fired (of course).  While working in Pennsylvania, Rush became a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers during the team’s Super Bowl dominance of the NFL in the 1970’s.

He eventually found another radio job in Kansas City.  After being fired (again), Rush Limbaugh took a job outside of the radio business for a few years.  This time, he worked in group sales for major league baseball’s Kansas City Royals.  During that time, he developed a close friendship with Hall-of-Famer George Brett and had a chance to reflect on his career trajectory.  Rush would say in a 2009 radio interview that his mother continued to encourage him in pursuing his first career love, radio.

In late 1983, Limbaugh tried working in radio again at Kansas City’s KMBZ 980-AM.  This time, though, he utilized his real name on the air and resumed his radio career as a local talk radio host.   And, once again, he was fired.

In 1984, Rush was fortunate enough to receive another chance to work in talk radio in Sacramento with 50,000 watt powerhouse KFBK-1530AM.  According to an

I have played golf since age eight.  Golf is a wonderful sport which brings a renewed chance to get outside and enjoy a few hours of fun and fairly moderate exercise.  It is, quite literally, a game for a lifetime.

The big problem with golf is that is increasingly taking a lifetime to play one round!

There have been so many changes made to the game over my lifetime which have made golf easier to play.  Gone are the clunky (and lightning rods) metal golf shoes.  Golf bags improved after the space program began and are now made from very strong but lightweight materials. 

As we’ve covered here several times, changes to the golf clubs and golf balls have (theoretically) made it easier to hit longer and straighter shots from tee to green.  Those of us playing golf before 1980 remember using wooden headed drivers and a “one-size-fits-all” blade-type set of irons. 

Though the design of putters have constantly changed and evolved (and then returned once again) over the years, it’s hard to say that any of today’s professional golfers are any better (or worse) putters than those from the Arnold Palmer years beginning in the late 1950’s.  The newest putting gimmick features bloated grips on the handles – some are round and some are  square.    

For those of us who are not professional golfers, golf allows us to utilize electric carts to ride in or, alternatively, some nifty new push/pull carts for those of us who find carrying our bag a little harder to do as we age.  Golfers at some clubs even have caddies to tote their bag of clubs and assist in determining yardage estimates and help with local course issues. 

The caddy might be able to tell you, “You’re 160 yards from the green with a sand trap on the left side and a lake just over the green”!  For those of us unable to afford a caddy, a golf cart, or a rental push/pull cart, we are expected to maintain our pace of play during the round of golf.  In addition to being more fun to play without slow play ahead, the golf course makes more money by having more rounds of play completed every day by paying golfers. 

If Joe Publinx pays his green fee to play that day, there may be a marshal near the first tee who will check to make sure you have paid and to advise that your round of 18 holes of golf should be completed in no more than four hours.  Finishing early is AOK, but there’s usually another marshal riding around in a cart on the grounds (or at the 10th tee) who is timing your progress.  If you weren’t already feeling a little pressure to pick-up the pace by the golfers behind you (who may hit a shot or two into your group to remind you to hurry-up), the local course marshal will also admonish your group if you are behind the 4-hour time allotted for completion.

The penalty for slow play on your local public golf course is being escorted to the parking lot and being sent home early.  It’s just plain courteous to the other golfers who are lined-up behind your group.  Golfers are notoriously courteous but can be rather impatient if they feel the toads ahead of them are slowing the pace down too much. 

In this increasing era of technological advances, most golf courses now are part of the global positioning satellite (GPS) grid.  In the past decade or so, there have been hand-held instruments developed to determine a golfer’s distance to the flag on the green for every shot. 

Before this advancement, golfers would rely on their scorecard to determine the hole’s total distance and then utilize local fairway markers for 200 yards (blue),...

If you’ve watched the National Basketball Association over the past twenty years, you have seen a number of talented hoopsters perfecting their crafts. 

Some basketball players have become proficient 3-point shooting specialists such as former Duke guard J.J. Redick.  Others crash the boards and annually lead the association in rebounds like Rudy Gobert of Utah.  Still others like Chris Paul of the Phoenix Suns dish-out assists and lead their teams.

Some NBA players have taken drama classes in the off-season and acted in movies and commercials.  LeBron James and several other NBA players have worked on the movie Space Jam 2 which is coming out this summer.

Apparently LeBron and many other players have taken their acting so seriously that they are now displaying it more frequently on the hardwood of the NBA courts, too.

Just last week, LeBron James and his Los Angeles Lakers teammate, Kyle Kuzma, both displayed their incredible acting chops during a home game against the Memphis Grizzlies.  

James, who is 6’ 9” and weighs a very solid 250 pounds, went after a rebound and was apparently hit so hard by a Memphis player that he was sent to the ground and lay sprawled on the basketball court for a few moments afterwards. 

Kuzma, who is 6’10” and weighs about 220 pounds, was also slammed to the floor during the fourth quarter of the game (won by the Lakers 115-105) by the same big, bad Memphis bully.    

The nasty old bully was none other than Memphis Grizzlies 6’7” shooting guard Dillon Brooks (who may weigh about 220 pounds). 

Both plays went under video review as it would be hard to imagine that a freight train the size of LeBron James could fall so hard under the basket like that.  Perhaps Dillon Brooks was secretly a martial arts specialist who used his leverage to fell those two big trees. 

What the video replays revealed was an art form which LeBron James has been perfecting as his career winds to a close.  James (who is the NBA’s most protected commodity) knows that the referees will give him the benefit of a doubt in just about any foul situation.  

With a little acting on his part, he can create the illusion that even a little old lady sitting in the first row would be able to bring him down.

The NBA calls this a “flop”.  A big fake.  When one of the largest and strongest men in the NBA (LeBron James) is suddenly lying on his back on the floor, a second look via the television monitors is usually warranted. 

Per the NBA rule book, here is the official definition:

“A ‘flop’ is an attempt to either fool referees into calling undeserved fouls or fool fans into thinking the referees missed a foul call by exaggerating the effect of contact with an opposing player.”

While the game was underway on Friday night, the three on-court NBA referees (despite having instant replay themselves) allowed the foul to be called on the smaller Dillon Brooks.  This faux foul put LeBron “The Actor” James at the free throw line for two free throws and an opportunity to collect his latest award for basketball thespian excellence.

After the game, the NBA home office reviewed the video from the foul and deemed that LeBron James had, indeed, earned another television Emmy for best Friday night performance with his latest flop.  Over his career, James has become increasingly well known for his “inability” (wink, wink) to maintain his balance despite towering over most of the players accused of doing the elbowing or pushing.

It’s not just LeBron James (although I think he is the NBA’s best at this...

In case you didn’t hear about this, Sunday’s National Football League Super Bowl 55 between the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers had the fewest number of television viewers in 52 seasons!  With a total CBS television audience of 91.63 million viewers, this weekend’s NFL season finale had the smallest number of viewers watching the game on home televisions since the 1969 match-up of Joe Namath’s New York Jets and the Baltimore Colts.

To put this in perspective, last year’s NFL championship game between Kansas City and San Francisco drew 100.4 million television viewers for the game.  This year’s game had 9% fewer fans watching on television. 

For the record, the NFL’s most watched Super Bowl came just six years ago in 2015 when New England squared off with Seattle.  More than 114.4 million fans watched that game.   

If you were expecting (like I was) to read this story on the CBS Sports internet site this week, I still haven’t found it.  Perhaps the executives at the Eyeball Network have gone into hiding should any advertisers claim the network overcharged based on expectations.  When a company pays over $5 ½ million for a television commercial and it is seen by nearly 10% fewer viewers than last year, the chants of “Refund! Refund…” may be echoing in the network’s lobby at this very moment.

One media site’s positive spin claimed that the football game set a new record with about five million people watching the game online (phones or computers) around the globe.  Whoop-t-doo!  With internet access globally and American football fans worldwide, that total should not be surprising.

Last Sunday’s season finale marked the end of my personal NFL boycott of the entire season of televised football games.   I wasn’t the only one in America who made it through the year without watching a televised NFL game, either.  Some sources indicated that this season’s NFL television ratings were down by seven percent from 2019.  Personally, I thought the drop would have been higher, but it doesn’t matter. 

The trend is not good for the NFL.  It is time to listen, Commissioner Roger Goodell.

With a country locked inside due to a lingering pandemic, more potential television viewers were at home to watch the game on Sunday.   With this being the 55th version of the big game, it’s not like viewers didn’t know when the football game was being played.  CBS is a traditional “over-the-air” network so the recent avalanche of cable cord cutters should have been able to watch the game for free.  The Las Vegas odds makers predicted a close game with Kansas City being a 3-point favorite, and Tampa Bay was the first team to play in its home stadium in a Super Bowl. 

The ratings drop wasn’t due to a lack of familiarity with the teams and players, either. 

Tampa Bay featured America’s best known quarterback in Tom Brady.  They certainly earned a spot in the big game after winning three consecutive road games (Washington, New Orleans, and Green Bay).  Kansas City (featuring the dynamic young Patrick Mahomes) had a lightning-fast offense again this season and was looking to repeat as champions.  The Chiefs had won eight of their final ten games by seven points or less.  Perhaps, they were ripe for an upset loss.    

The glitter of this game has worn off.   In past years, many casual fans would watch the Super Bowl game anticipati...