Happy New Year (to everybody except the Pats)

2007 was a rough year for sports, may be the roughest in recent memory. Between the dog killers, crooked refs and roid-heads across all athletic endeavors, no sport or league - minor or major was spared major embarrassment. I am sure all league commissioners are excited to turn the page on the calendar, not that 08 is going to magically erase all their problems. As we enter 08, MLB might still have the bigger problem of the 3 followed by the NFL and the NBA. Nobody since the start of the season has made the crooked ref a big issue for the NBA except for the trash-talking by the fans at the arenas fter bad calls. People seem to be quite indifferent to NBA's Donaghy issue. But then again, isn't indifference the biggest problem for the association? People seem to be indifferent to the league in general since number 23 retired back in the 1900s!

So may be NBA still has the biggest problem in terms of it's popularity and market value. Even LeBron's trip to the finals didn't help anything. That was quite shocking to me and I am not sure what can resurrect the NBA if the King can't. My last hope now is a LeBron-Kobe finals, but then again, Kobe in the Finals is not what we should be counting on considering how he managed his career in 07. I still love this game, but the rest of America doesn't seem to. It would be interesting to see how many people stayed away from the TV or the NBA arenas because of the crooked ref. Lots and lots of people post messages to the effect "the game is always fixed", but most of them sound like disgruntled fans of losing teams that night or "conspiracy theory" fans who always thought NBA was fixed, but they now feel vindicated and are coming out and are being louder because of the recent scandal.

I still ranked NFL's problems higher because the dog fighting is just not going away. Vick is very much in the news and so is Pacman and NFL can't kick them away. I am sure NFL's king status among sports is as strong as ever and apparently their Pats-Colts regular season game was a ratings bonanza like never seen before. Personally I think the NFL has some issues to deal with. I felt like I could not watch most of their games on any given Sunday. I have always felt like NFL's version of parity is flawed and it was just a road to mediocrity. This year it has come true. The league is full of mediocre play and the QBs suck big-time! This can't be healthy for the league in the long run. NFL needs to tweak it's bad financial system to fix this. They should move towards a more flexible salary cap structure like the NBA. What parity are we talking about when teams are going 16-0. Even if we agree that it was a function of one extremely well-run franchise, what about the quality of the other teams in the league? Except the Colts, Cowboys, Chargers, Packers and may be the Jaguars and the Steelers there are no teams worth watching.

I am not talking about teams with chances of winning it all. I know thats just an handful in every league. But it's just the Patriots in the NFL and only a handful of teams are even watchable in this league. We could swap the other lower-half teams in the playoffs with a completely different set of teams and I don't think we will even notice. Anyways, it's all good for the Pats. They went 16-0 though they had some difficulty in some contests. This is what gives us pats-haters some hope. The Giants played them tough in the final contest and almost beat them much like the Eagles and Ravens before them. The Pats might be beatable after all. They are one team that probably is sad 2007 is over. They had an awesome year and they can only hope 08 is even close. Can they go 3-0 now to win the big one? Lets see. In the spirit of the New Year, I would like to see the glass half-full. The good news with their 16-0 is that we don't have to deal with the 72 dolphins and their champagne bottles anymore. Also, the spy-gate thing still hovers over the Pats. I think any number of 40-0 trashing of teams could not have washed away that asterix. I like it that way.

Speaking of the asterix, MLB has been carrying one for around 10 years now. Mitchell report only made it bolder and bigger, but lets see how the MLB reacts. It's still entertainment and people show up for games, but MLB and their experts just don't seem to get the long-term effects of this roid-era. There's a huge loss in opportunity costs with scandals surrounding historic figures like Bonds and Clemens. It's hard to quantify this, but it's strange that a history-rich and history-dependent sport like Baseball doesn't seem to understand this at all. They seem happy to collect the gate receipts and the check from FOX and pretend like the roid-era has had ZERO impact. Good luck with that assumption.