Feeling a bit lazy, I decided to see what the world of sports entertainment was offering on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In a better age, the answer would have been nothing unless you lived in a city with an NBA or NHL team. They would play their games before the weekend and then take off for the holiday. In this age, the people who run the sports leagues think Christmas is the perfect time to make their mostly black employees perform for them and the rest of us.

A few minutes looking at the sports sites and it was clear it was going to be college basketball or nothing at all, always a good option. It has been so long since I have consumed college basketball, it was a bit confusing. The game that jumped out at me was Midway University versus Bellarmine. Midway is not located on a Pacific island, as the name would suggest. It is in Kentucky and originally called the Kentucky Female Orphan School. Now they play men’s basketball.

One of the things you quickly notice when scanning the college basketball schedule is that we have far too many colleges. Not to pick on the good folks at the Kentucky Female Orphan School, but what is the point? When it was actually a female orphan school, it made some sense. Taking care of female orphans is a good thing, but now it is a university handing out worthless credentials. We could easily shutter half of our colleges, and no one would notice.

That aside, the other thing that caught my eye is the array or weird platforms on which these games are now broadcast. The shift away from traditional television to the internet has led to a proliferation of sites. There was a tournament broadcast on something called FloSports, which sounds like a name created by the con men who run the sports nutrition rackets. It turns out that they specialize in low interest niche sports and the small-timers in major sports.

They charge $30 per month for their service, which seems like a big number for the content they are offering. Perhaps if you love F1 racing and you live in the United States, that is a bargain. They are sponsoring college basketball tournaments on the assumption that the fans of the teams involved will spend the money to watch a few games of their favorite team. It is a clever racket, but it also a form of kidnapping in that they are holding the content hostage.

This is something happening with all sports. The NFL is now posting games on Amazon Prime, thus forcing fans to subscribe to it for games, in addition to whatever they use for other television content. There is a network called Peacock that now has select college football games. If you are a fan of Notre Dame, you now must subscribe to the Peacock thing to see their games. It will not be long before much of the sports content is behind an array of paywalls.

This is a sign of decline. As these pay-per-view schemes proliferate, the ways around them proliferate just as fast. Getting the content from FloSports, for example, is simple if you know where to look. There are lots of overseas operators who are indifferent to the financial dreams of our entertainment schemers. With a VPN you can watch just about any sporting event on earth without paying a dime. In fact, you can get any content you like this way, even new release movies.

What you see forming up is what happened to the music rackets. By the 1980’s, the music industry was dependent on two bottlenecks. One was album sales where you paid for ten songs, even though you wanted just one song. The other was commercial radio where you could listen to that one song, but also hours of ads and live reads from drug-addled disc jockeys. The music rackets charged the crap out of the radio stations for use of their content.

Then the mp3 arrived and that was the end of the music rackets. Suddenly you could get that one song without buying an album. Not only that, but the song was also free, and you could easily make copies for your friends. The music industry fought this, but eventually they lost the fight. Now recorded music is just a marketing expense to promote live shows and sell other product. Bands now make more money selling t-shirts and caps than they make from recorded music.

This is what is happening to sports. People are willing to watch a game made twice as long by the insertion of advertising. They will pay a small fee to watch games with the same ads, but if they have choices. They will pay a higher fee for ad free content and lots of choices. They will not pay high fees for what amounts to a three-hour ad campaign with some sports content sprinkled into it. They will find other ways to see the games or simply stop watching.

The lesson of the mp3 is that you cannot beat technology. The music companies sued people for sharing music, but it had no impact on the process. The sports leagues can try the same thing with the pirate sites, but it will fail too. It is simply too easy to access these sites. What is even funnier about this is most of the pirate sites block the ads during the games. The leagues cannot even say to their advertisers that their ads are getting viewed by the pirate users.

There is a cost to this. Pop music has reached a nadir because the only way to make money is to generate Potemkin stars like Taylor Swift. The reason you never hear anyone talk about the content of a Taylor Swift song is because even her fans do not care about the content. It is simply a thing to be swept up in until she gets too fat to make it work and a new star is generated. The same is true for the butt wigglers who target the black music audience.

This may be why movies and television are terrible now. On the one hand, they need to make going to the theater appealing, which means massive computer-generated worlds that dazzle on the big screen. On the other hand, it means dealing with the reality that content best watched at home is easily pirated. That leaves little motivation to pay for quality writing and directing. Instead, the money goes to attention grabbing nonsense like race-swapping and girl bosses.

That paints a bleak picture for sports entertainment. A model built on the assumption that television revenues will continue to grow at double digit rates is not going to do well when the revenue stops growing entirely. Throw in the fact that owning a team is mostly about tax dodging and rent seeking and you see the problem. Like music in the 1980’s, the sports entertainment world is a massive bubble. Similarly, technology is the pin that will pop that bubble.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

**Promotions: **Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa@******************ns.com.