Before every football season, columnist Drew Magary puts together a wildly entertaining series of posts laying out in excruciating detail the case for why each team in the league sucks. The “Why Your Team Sucks” series is a perfect showcase for how sometimes deep, cutting negativity is the only way to truly appreciate something you love.
I love sports, and I’ll watch any of them on any given day. But they all suck, in their own particular ways. Here’s why:
Football
Let’s start here: football is a sport that fewer and fewer children are playing every year because of how likely it is to give them brain injuries. It’s an inherently violent game that’s frequently compared to war, and also the most politically contentious sport, in part because of its overt efforts to capture and profit from a certain type of patriotism while also stifling player’s freedom of expression.
It has the most commercials and the least sports per broadcast. If the ads are an integral part of your championship game, and a draw for a significant number of viewers who don’t actually care about football, you might have an unhealthy relationship with consumerism.
Why football might not suck: Fantasy football and other football-related gambling are a great way to make football interesting.
Baseball
The “unwritten rules” of baseball are some of the dumbest social constructs in sports. There are plenty of examples but the worst in recent memory is the 2020 controversy around slugger Fernando Tatis Jr’s home run. The Padres slugger was facing the woeful Texas Rangers in the 8th inning, with his team winning by seven. Tatis faced a 3-0 count with the bases loaded and he (gasp) swung at the pitch. And hit a grand slam. The criticism that followed was some of the most pathetic garbage I have ever heard. Some players and coaches (including his own manager!) took shots at him because there’s apparently an unwritten mercy rule of sorts that said he should have let the pitch go by instead of smashing it out of the park. The guy later felt he had to APOLOGIZE FOR HITTING A HOME RUN. Here’s what I think: if you don’t want to get embarrassed, maybe try not being bad at baseball. Also, seven runs isn’t that much! Teams have come back from more.
Anyway, baseball sucking is something I feel very passionate about. The games are also too long. And the coaches are big babies.
Why baseball might not suck: Shohei Ohtani and Jomboy’s lip reading breakdowns of arguments between managers and umpires are the sport’s only redeeming qualities.
Basketball
The officiating in basketball is so opaque that a referee fixed games for (at least) two seasons and nobody noticed until the FBI started investigating. That ref, Tim Donaghy, also made more than 100 less than two-minute phone calls to another ref during the same time period he was talking to gamblers. The recipient of those calls, Scott Foster, is STILL WORKING FOR THE LEAGUE and has some complicated relationships with star players.
Every sport has its issues with officiating, but basketball manages to be uniquely frustrating. My favorite example is the “last two minutes” reports. The league puts out reports outlining the accuracy of every call made by the refs in the last two minutes of close games. Every report finds a number of mistakes by the refs, but that’s not what’s most galling to me. It’s the fact that the league is only transparent about its wildly inconsistent officiating in this tiny fraction of the game. A point in the last two minutes counts just the same as one in any other time of the game, even if more people happen to be watching on TV.
Why basketball might not suck: That time Paul Pierce pooped his pants during a playoff game and then got wheelchaired off the court.
Soccer
The usual complaints about soccer (diving, injury faking, time wasting) have been done a million times, so let’s get into some of the more nuanced suckitude. Why on earth do referees just get to decide mostly at random how much stoppage time to add on? It can be anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes at the end of each half, and it sometimes correlates to how much time was wasted by injury or tomfoolery, and sometimes not.
The biggest sport in the world also has huge problems with corruption and money. Any country can essentially bribe its way to hosting a World Cup (like, say, Qatar which is also killing thousands of migrant workers as it frantically builds stadiums and infrastructure for next year’s event). FIFA doesn’t try to hide its money grabs. And the European club scene is becoming an increasingly grotesque race to the top as Russian oligarchs and state-backed Middle Eastern businessmen buy clubs and pump money into them, brute forcing their way into being the best teams and the world and skirting feeble attempts by the sport’s governing bodies to slow them down.
Why soccer might not suck: Goalkeepers coming up to join the attack in the last seconds with their team trailing is one of the most ridiculous and fun final plays in sports. And when they do manage to score, it’s unparalleled mayhem.
Hockey
The biggest problem with hockey as a spectator sport is that if you haven’t dedicated hours and hours to watching the game, it’s impossible to tell what’s happening until the whistle blows or a red light goes on to indicate that someone has scored a goal. Seriously, it’s hard to see the puck. I don’t have a solution to this at hand, but it’s one of the reasons hockey sucks.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that hockey glorifies fighting, allowing players to take their aggression out on the ice by punching each other, because apparently letting them check (body slam) other players as part of the sport’s natural flow wasn’t enough violence.
Why hockey might not suck: The auditory element of live hockey is an unmatched sports listening experience.
Lightning round!
Golf: Literally everything about it
Tennis: The best players are too dominant for too long
NASCAR: Bad for the environment
Boxing/MMA: These sports’ fans enjoy watching people hurt each other
Volleyball: Honestly? Nothing. Pretty much the perfect sport.
Disagree with something here? Complaints and hate mail encouraged. You know how to reach me.