The Games We Loved Are Leaving Us

I’ve been watching sports my whole life, and lately I feel like a guy standing in his front yard watching the moving trucks haul away everything he grew up with. The furniture’s the same — balls, bats, helmets, hardwood — but the house doesn’t feel like home anymore.

Let’s take a lap around the sports world, shall we?

The NFL: Strategic Violence, Now Violence-Free

The NFL built an empire on controlled brutality, then legislated the brutality out of the building. I understand the health science — I do — and the longtime league insiders who’ve covered the CBA era have explained the math: padded practices capped, two-a-days extinct, tackling rehearsed on pads and dummies. But let’s be honest about what we’re watching. Practices before 2000 were forges. Practices today are choreography — duck-duck-goose in shoulder pads. And then we wonder why tackling in September looks like a suggestion.

College Football: The Tooth Fairy Wears a Letterman Jacket

And now the college game, where the last pretense has finally collapsed. This summer, court rulings and the NCAA’s new five-years-in-five eligibility framework cracked open a door nobody imagined: players who’ve already been in NFL camps heading back to campus, because the NIL and revenue-share money is better than clinging to a practice-squad life. One tight end who spent August with two NFL teams landed at an SEC power days before the season. The Big Ten slammed its door; the SEC grumbled but stepped aside; the lawyers, as always, are just getting warmed up. Ross Dellenger and Pete Thamel — the two best reporters on the college beat, full stop — have chronicled every beam of this collapsing structure.

So picture it: an 18-year-old true freshman lining up across from a 24-year-old man with an NFL training camp on his résumé. Imagine a college senior running the Oklahoma drill against a high school freshman. That’s not development. That’s a mismatch we’d never tolerate anywhere else in sports.

And the transfer portal? It’s free agency with a meal plan. Coach raises his voice, playing time dips, a kid gets all up in his feelings — hello, portal, goodbye, accountability. There’s no roster continuity, no earned loyalty, no waiting your turn. The “student-athlete” is as real as the tooth fairy, and everybody from the athletic director to the collective’s bagman knows it.

The WNBA: Biting the Hand That Feeds

Start with the WNBA, a league that finally — finally — has the golden goose it spent three decades praying for. Caitlin Clark didn’t just move the needle. She is the needle. Sellouts. Charter flights. TV ratings the league had never sniffed. And how has the league stewarded that gift? By letting her get hip-checked, eye-poked, and body-slammed while the whistles stay in pockets. Christine Brennan, one of the most decorated sports journalists in America, spent a season chronicling the Clark phenomenon for USA Today and in her book on the subject, her reporting laid bare an uncomfortable truth: the league’s handling of its most valuable asset — on the floor and in the discourse around race and resentment that swirls through that locker room culture — has been somewhere between tone-deaf and self-destructive.

Meanwhile, the same players deliver forearm shivers to the woman responsible for the revenue growth fueling their next collective bargaining agreement, then step to the microphone to demand NBA-adjacent money. Fellas — sorry, ladies — you can’t torch the goose and still expect the eggs. It doesn’t work that way but the league, captained by those with questionable intelligence, allows it to happen. And while all this plays out, the WNBA continues to wobble on questions of eligibility and policy it seems institutionally allergic to answering plainly. Pick a lane. Any lane. They all seemingly end in brick wall.

The NBA: The Inmates Run the Asylum

Speaking of the NBA, remember when general managers built rosters? Quaint, right? Today’s superstars text each other in July and assemble superteams like they’re picking sides at the YMCA. The player-empowerment era — exhaustively documented by the news-breakers who cover that league for a living — has turned front offices into concierge services. Trade demands with three years left on a max deal. Load management. Buyout-market musical chairs. It’s pickup basketball with private jets, and the paying customer is the last consideration in the room.

MLB: A Beautiful Game, Lobotomized

Then there’s baseball, the sport of my youth, the inspiration fueling the best sports movies of all time, has managed to be broken in two directions at once.

Economically, it’s the only major American sport without a salary cap, and the men who cover the sport’s labor wars for The Athletic — Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich chief among them — have spent years detailing the widening canyon between the haves and the have-nots. The Dodgers can defer a billion dollars like Norm and his bar tab at Cheers while small-market fans are told to enjoy the rebuild. Again.

Aesthetically? The game’s been strip-mined by the spreadsheet crowd. Jayson Stark, a Hall of Fame-honored baseball writer, has documented the disappearance of the sport’s connective tissue better than anyone: the hit-and-run, the sacrifice bunt, hitting behind the runner, the lost art of hitting the cutoff man, taking the extra base because you earned it. All of it sacrificed at the altar of three true outcomes. We pay pitchers to strike people out and hitters to launch it over the fence, and everything in between — the baseball part of baseball — has been declared inefficient. A sport that optimizes away its own soul isn’t smart. It’s bankrupt where it counts.

The Common Thread

Look, I’m not against players making money. I’m not against safety. I’m not against progress. But somewhere along the way, every league decided that the thing that made it special — competitive integrity, roster-building craft, situational genius, physical standards, the amateur ideal — was negotiable. And once everything’s negotiable, nothing’s sacred. Nothing!

The WNBA can’t protect its meal ticket. The NBA can’t govern its stars. Baseball can’t protect its soul or its small markets. The NFL can’t practice football. And college football can’t tell you what a college player even is anymore.

When will the madness stop?

To borrow from Eddie Money, “I wanna go back, and do it all over.”

Maybe I’m just an old man yelling at the clouds…

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