If I could change the sports world (seriously), Part II

After being nearly lulled unconscious by my 20th college football bowl game, I’m beginning to think this was a bad idea …

Here are a few more suggestions of what I would do as an “American Sports Czar,” making slight to significant changes/improvements to the standards and customs of our national and regional pastimes:

Soccer

Where to start … OK, no more ties. Penalty kicks work, thanks.

Second, none of this “a goal scored on the road counts as a point-plus” thing — the rule that moved Seattle’s MLS squad through the first playoff series and bumped them from the semifinal. Dumb. Each game counts as a game, and again, no ties. Settle it with PKs. If you need three games, do it, with the third either at a neutral site or at the higher seed.

Third, enough of the griping to the referees. It happens waaaaaay too much at pretty much every level of soccer. In football, you bark at the ref, you get a flag.

In basketball, a technical and after two you’re gone. In baseball, you’re out of the game. In soccer, the official just has to sit there and take it.

Instead, every time a player (or coach) so much as sneers toward a ref, they get two minutes in a penalty box, a la hockey. Their team goes down a player and they have to stand there in the “box of shame” while the other team gets a kind of power play.

Fourth, start making some sense of the pro seasons. I’d say I’m close to the prototypical, casual American soccer fan. I go to a game or two each season, get jazzed when the playoffs start, buy the occasional shirt or scarf. But there is little rhyme or reason to the Major Soccer League seasons in terms of playing dates or times, with teams like the Sounders playing in MLS games and the CONCACAF Champions League and for the U.S. Open Cup, seemingly all at the same time.

If MLS games were on at a standard time and familiar playing days (each Monday and Wednesday night and Saturday mid-afternoon, for example, with a few byes), it’d draw tons more casual fans and rival the Big Three.

Hockey

I don’t know what’s wrong with hockey. Maybe nothing is wrong here. Maybe they could turn off the refrigeration to the rink in the third period and see what happens …

High school sports

Not much to complain about here, as the Washington State Interscholastic Activities Association does a pretty good job making things fair for most schools across the board. They could add/expand classifications — with 296 school districts the state has six classifications, with about 200 Oregon also has six — but we don’t want to be water down too much the value of state berths.

One small change that might make things a bit more balanced is have private preparatory schools get their own division.

Second, I’d like to see Super State competitions for certain sports. Add another weekend to the wrestling season in which the top two, three or four wrestlers from each weight division battle each other for who is truly the best wrestler at, say, 132 pounds or at 170. My guess is those guys in the 1A division could take a few of those kids from the 4A Seattle and Spokane schools.

It wouldn’t work (or be safe) for some sports like football, where a 4A school with 300-pound linemen would be taking on the 152-pound grunts from a small school, but it would work easily for sports like cross country, basketball, volleyball, softball and baseball, tennis and more.

Sports talk radio

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the line, sports radio jockeys started talking about everything except sports. Enough of the “you wouldn’t believe what I did Saturday” commentary and let’s breakdown the Seahawks-versus-Rams, OK?

Tone down the fantasy sports

Last year, Forbes estimated the economy created by Americans’ expenditures on fantasy football — from direct revenues to time value — and came up with this figure: $70 billion.

In other words, we spent more money playing fantasy football than the Gross Domestic Product of Azerbaijan (UN, 2012) or Croatia or Kenya or Belarus — and more than the GDP of Honduras, Uganda and Latvia combined.

Forbes noted that instead of figuring out how Panthers running back Jonathan Stewart figures into our FF lineup next week, we could, say, more than double the annual budget of The National Institutes of Health. Or send a spacecraft like India’s Mars Orbiter into space each day, for 946 days … or, by United Nations estimates, solve the the world hunger crisis for two full years.

That being said … my fantasy football team crushed it in championship week. My heartfelt thanks to Odell Beckham Jr.

One more thing …

Normally I couldn’t care less about school fight songs, particularly one of a school far from Washington state’s borders. But I had to find this a little shocking. Here is (I kid you not) the school fight song for New Mexico State:

“Aggies, oh Aggies

The hills send back the cry

we’re here to do or die!”

OK so far …

“Aggies, oh Aggies

We’ll win this game or know the reason why”

Sounds fine …

“And when we win this game

We’ll buy a keg of booze

And we’ll drink to the Aggies

‘Til we wobble in our shoes

A-G-G-I-E-S!”