January 31st: Northwestern Union

The world of college sports was changed forever on Tuesday. For the first time in history, members of the Northwestern University football team filed to join a workers’ union.

Led by quarterback Kain Colter, the movement attempts to get the players recognized as school employees and receive certain benefits that have, to this point, been unattainable for most college athletes. Colter cited healthcare for injuries beyond an athlete’s playing days as one such benefit the players were pursuing.

In their response, the NCAA declared their disappointment at the action, stating that playing college sports doesn’t make someone an employee and that the experience is meant to be about learning, something Colter and the group are failing to understand.

This is, though, quite the opposite of what is happening. Colter and his group are making an incredible education for themselves. They are looking at the way things are and critically thinking about what can be done to make things better.

In addition to better medical care, Colter’s action for unionization includes 10 additional goals, ranging from better graduation rates and more scholarship money for players. In each of the goals, the focus moves drastically from treating these people as athletic resources and instead treating them as students, employees, and valued individuals in the school community.

This all comes at a culminating moment in the growing movement to protect the rights of college athletes. For several years, analysts have argued the merits of paying college players for the use of their name. Why, after all, should the school rake in dollars because of the fame and respect brought in by an individual, while leaving that person out in the cold.

At the beginning of this college season, reining Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel was accused of being paid to sign autographs which would have violated NCAA rules. After a long investigation, it became pretty clear that there was a problem. If Manziel was suspended, his school would suffer huge losses, both athletic and financial. If they didn’t suspend him, the NCAA would come away looking totally impotent, incapable of policing their policies as necessary. In the end, the half-game suspension Manziel served was seen as a copout, and the issue only gained intensity.

All things considered, the Northwestern representatives are demanding action in a way that is constructive, rather than simply defying authority. They are attempting to find a spot at the table, rather than ignore the structure of leadership altogether.

It doesn’t really matter if you agree that college players should unionize or not. That isn’t the point. This isn’t meant to be an answer, it’s meant to get the ball rolling on the discussion. Northwestern University’s players took the action they deemed necessary to defend their rights as student-athletes, not with the attitude of defiance but focusing on debate.

While the NCAA may not like it, accusing the students of failing to see the learning opportunities in the situation is downright ludicrous. There is a lot of learning that happens on a college campus. If Kain Colter and his teammates can walk away from NU knowing how to stand up for what they believe in a respectful yet decisive way, then the school and NCAA have done their jobs.

January 24th: Full Court Press

My biggest complaint about basketball was always that it is emotionally abusive. The flow of momentum is so temporary that it is nearly impossible to know the trajectory of the game based on the first quarter, or even the third. The old saying “the last two minutes are all that matters,” is even more extreme. It isn’t an oddity to see a 20 point lead evaporate, only to be regained.

January, though, can do strange things to sports fans. With baseball’s slowest off-season in recent memory and the impossibility of finding hockey on national television, the only weekday sports option is to be found on the hardwood. I’ve begun to follow the NBA as well as college basketball a little more intensely. More so than the NCAA, professional basketball is like nothing else in the sporting world.

In any team sport, there are superstars who define the organization. In the NBA, those superstars often transcend their team. In most sports, fans follow a team primarily, with one or two players who catch some extra attention. Basketball sees team fans, sure, but more importantly, you’re a Kobe fan, a LeBron fan, a Durant fan. Following a player is more possible because, with only 5 players at a time, an individual has more of an impact on the outcome of the game.

For all of their challenges, though, the NBA’s marketing department has made quite a bold statement, especially recently. It is enormously difficult to maintain fan excitement over the course of an 82 game season. To solve the problem, the NBA marketing department comes up with countless ways to make individual games more exciting.

On Christmas day, the league used new jerseys with sleeves in an attempt to give the players a new look. It was recently released that the All-star game would also feature similar jerseys. Earlier this month, the Heat and Nets played a game while wearing nickname jerseys, an event that also will repeat throughout the year.  While both of these promotions focus primarily on attempting to sell more basketball swag, it demonstrates a kind of promotional mojo that should serve the league well, at least from the creativity standpoint. The caveat to that is, of course, ensuring that the intent is to offer a unique fan experience, rather than simply turning into a purely money driven operation.

Even with the promotions, though, the challenge of making an 82 game regular season exciting is one that will continue to cause fans to walk away, to get lazy during the year. Once April rolls around, though, being an NBA fan becomes contagious. The playoffs add the intensity that becomes a scarcity during the regular season. Funny how the threat of going home can make the game come alive.

Some of the challenges that professional basketball faces are unique to the NBA, while some are present in all major sports. The league has made significant attempts to find solutions and have varying levels of success. The commitment itself will, hopefully, help professional basketball continue to be relevant and exciting for fans.

As a relatively newly minted NBA fan, I have plenty more to learn. At the very least, the league succeeded at getting my attention.

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January 18th: THIS Given Sunday

If the television networks and journalism community could have a meeting at the beginning of the year and write a script for the NFL season, I’m sure they would in a heartbeat. This year, though, it doesn’t look like they would have needed to. They are getting everything they could have dreamed of.

The NFL Conference Championship games are to play this weekend, with the Broncos hosting the Patriots in the AFC and the Seahawks squaring off against the 49ers in the NFC. Both games feature rematches of earlier regular season games. The Broncos and Patriots game went to overtime. The Seahawks and Niners split their season series.

That would have been enough to set the stage for an epic Sunday of football. Now enter the quarterbacks. Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are the golden boys of the NFL. Each has almost 2 decades of success in the league, with a combined four Super Bowl rings. Yet, each has something to prove. Of those four rings, only one belongs to Manning, who has been accused of being a regular season stud and a post-season dud. Brady, on the other hand, has made two Super Bowl appearances in the last 5 years, and failed to win it both times. He and his depleted wide receiver corps are playing with a chip on their shoulder, looking to prove that the Patriots are truly the sum of its (somewhat undersized) parts.

In Seattle, the contrast is a little more conflicting, rather than complimenting. Russell Wilson is clean-cut, well-spoken, and proper. He plays with a good head on his shoulders, and uses his small size to make a big statement. Colin Kaepernick is tattooed, edgy, a fierce competitor, with huge physical talent and a cannon for an arm. Both have been in the league for a fraction of the Manning/Brady era, yet have already accumulated wins at a historic pace.

The NFL TV community loves to say “Any Given Sunday.” Basically, anyone can beat anyone else if all of the pieces fall into place. This often leads to the playoffs looking nothing like they did in the predictions issued at the beginning of the year.

This year, the parity in the league was even more intense. There was a graphic that showed how each team has beaten a team that beat someone else, winding around in a circle. It was meant to prove that, if the Broncos beat the Chiefs, who beat the Cowboys, who beat the Eagles, all the way around and around until the Bengals who beat the Patriots, who beat the Broncos, than the league has reached a certain level of competition.

The matchups this weekend, though, were exactly as many envisioned. It also shows, only mildly arguably, that the best four teams in the sport are playing for a chance to go to the Super Bowl.

With plenty of storylines, these matchups offer the kind of television that CBS and Fox Sports producers can drool over. No matter what happens in the game, nothing is as good for them as a matchup that Sportscenter can’t stop talking about.

The scores, of course, are much harder to predict, but that didn’t stop every sports analyst from attempting it. Vegas has the Broncos and Seahawks as the favorites, while many others believe that the underdog role suits both the 49ers and Patriots just fine.

None of it really matters. What does matter is that, on Sunday, every NFL fan will be glued to the television. Because as much as we love a surprise hero or a Cinderella, we save our big dances for the kings of football.