Formula Fun

Why the Middle Class Trap Makes Sports Worse

I’m not sure why the AI thought “Formula One car on the moon” meant I wanted an astronaut with it but this is essentially my dream.

WARNING: This post is “about” sports, in the sense that I’m using a discussion about sports as a metaphor and introduction to bigger ideas. If you’re turned off by that, please come back as we further explore this idea - sportsfree - next week. But I think it’s worth the read.

As far back as I can remember, I have loved watching sports. I will watch almost any sport. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, Olympics, rodeo, you name it, I’ll watch it. This is not unusual. If you look at this chart of the 100 most viewed television broadcasts in America for 2021 you’ll see that television is essentially a sports – particularly NFL – delivery system. Like most Americans, I love watching sports. And, like an increasing number of Americans, I’ve lately taken to watching Formula One racing.

Why? It’s not for any deep love of motorsports. And it’s certainly not because the sport is particularly exciting. F1 is a European sport and, thus, poorly designed for an American.¹ It is partially because of Netflix’s wonderful Drive to Survive series. But it’s largely for a simple reason. F1 uses modern technology to broadcast their sport in a way that is optimal to maximizing why people like sports.

Sports are popular spectacle for many reasons, but let’s narrow it down to what I consider to be the big three. First, they appeal to our innate tribalism. You identify with something (people, a team, etc.) that is constantly competing. Secondly, that is combined with impressive physical spectacle. Chicks don’t just dig the longball² because it results in the biggest swing in win probability: they’re genuinely impressive spectacle. Every popular sport is full of impressive feats that are a joy to watch for the simple fact that they’re beyond most of our ability.

Of course, if we just wanted to watch impressive feats, the most popular sports in America would be slamball. Back in the dying days of monoculture, professional wrestling peaked its head back through for one last gasp of broad popularity. And a popular expression you’d hear in trying to explain this is that it was “a soap opera for men.” Leaving aside all the anachronism in that statement, I’d say this is the main driving force for why all sports are popular. Humans are bred to be obsessed with narrative. And sports are narrative machines. Why do you think we have so many sports movies? Sports are drama factories for a species obsessed with drama.

As such, if I were broadcasting a sport, I would focus on increasing identification with whomever people are rooting for, highlighting the spectacle, and telling the story. Nobody agrees with me on this. Or, at least, if you watched sports you’d think no one agrees with me. Because sports aren’t presented in a way that maximizes these factors. They’re presented in a way that feels comfortable and never changes. To demonstrate this, check out my sweet video editing skills. In this first one, I took random plays from World Series a decade apart³ to see just how much change there has been.

If you, like me, don’t like watching videos in articles, I’ll briefly summarize. In 1952 they set a camera up behind home plate. It follows the ball when hit. By 1965 they moved it to centerfield. That’s it. They added a lot of graphics, started showing replays, but that’s about it. If my grandpa saw the 2021 World Series it wouldn’t look that much different to him.

Ahh, well, baseball is a dying dinosaur that’s made for old men, you say. I bet that hip young sport of the NBA⁴ is innovating!

This video is even shorter because there’s less to point out. In fairness, “point a camera at the court and follow the ball” is obvious. But nothing but some better graphics in fifty years is amazing. In fairness, these sports sometimes do some cool camera angles for replays. But the actual play is presented almost identically.

I’m not going to do the same for the National Football League, and not just because video editing is more time-consuming than I thought. The NFL is a titan. They can do whatever they want. But more to the point, they’re brilliant at maximizing the disadvantage of their awful broadcasts. The view we get is a terrible way to watch football games. But there’s also only about seven minutes of action in an entire football season. The NFL drags that out through constant replays – including from great angles – and through brilliantly monetizing the footage that lets you see all the players, selling it directly to die-hards. Most importantly, sixty years ago, Technopoptimist Hall of Famer Ed Sabol⁵ realized that an NFL game could be shot like a movie, proved it, and then fellow Technopoptimist Hall of Famer Pete Rozelle⁶ bought his company and turned it into NFL Films. The NFL Films presentation was transformative and regarded by many as a key development in the NFL becoming king. They created shows like NFL Game of the Week, which debuted in 1965 and compressed the week’s best game into a half hour with different angles and sounds of the game. And the brilliant They Call It Pro Football is not just brilliant, although it is. The film is the exact kind of innovation, 1960s style, in how sports are presented that I’m talking about. The NFL has so much time between games they literally turn the games into movies, fueling excitement for the games. Meanwhile, baseball and basketball throw games at you every night that – bar some nice graphics – could be straight out of the time this movie was made.

Now, what about Formula One? I don’t need to do a supercut. This is video of the 2001 Malaysian Grand Prix. You only need to watch a little to get a taste, but I assure you, out of journalistic integrity I watched the entire Grand Prix before posting this and it’s quite representative.

This breaks all my rules. You can barely tell who the drivers are. The impressive of what they’re doing is difficult to discern – always a part of any sports, particularly motorsport. Perhaps they should put a regular person in a Subaru out there to demonstrate how fast they’re going. And the drama is being entirely carried by the – admittedly impressive – announcers. There’s only occasional graphics letting you know what’s going on. I’m sure if you turned this into a movie – like the criminally underrated Ron Howard masterpiece Rush – it would be exciting. But watching this it’s no surprise this sport was completely ignored in America. But now, oh, wait, you have to click through and watch it on YouTube because - despite being technologically advanced - the people who run Formula One are so out of touch with any modern standards of publicitly that they would rather people not see their product than see it. But since this is an article about the very smart people who run their broadcasts, and not the very stupid people who run their business, I would urge you to either click through to watch it or just skip down a couple paragraphs to my summation.

These are practically two different sports. If you’re interested in how they pull it off these videos get into some of the technical challenges. And everything is maximizing the factors I talked about earlier. The camera angles and direction are better. The extensive usage of on-board cameras – not just during replays but during live action – hits all three factors on their own. The graphics make a qualitative difference, more than other sports. Since the gap between the cars is the source of all the drama, having near constant information on that is huge. But the biggest is what’s known as team radio. This is where you hear the conversations between the drivers and their teams. It’s both how you get to know the drivers while also turning the entire race into a soap opera. That’s how you get a seven-time champion going on a profanity laden rant against his own team. It’s narrative for a narrative obsessed species.

If you skipped the last few paragraphs because you’re not a sports person, the summary here is that while Formula One was completely overhauling its presentation, MLB and the NBA have spent half a century coming up with the wonderful innovation of “more on-screen graphics.” Which leads to our question of why?

I would presume there’s two main problems here. And they’re both rooted in the fact that people are resistant to change. Even the one change that has been uniformly adopted and almost universally loved – putting information about the game on the screen – used to be derided by America’s favorite sportswriter Bill Simmons. And people’s resistance to change leads to the Middle Class trap. The easiest way for me to explain that concept is you permitting me one last sports video.

That is a relic of the 1990s known as the Glow Puck. Basically, the NHL was flying high, challenging the NBA for the third spot in the American sports pantheon. Its broadcast rights were bought by Fox who attempted to make the sport more accessible by addressing the biggest complaint non-hockey fans had: they couldn’t follow the puck. And thus, the Glow Puck – technically called FoxTrax⁷ – was born. And I cannot explain to you how hated this was. It only lasted two and a half seasons. Hockey fans didn’t like it. And hockey, desperately trying to hold on to its middle class position, didn’t want to risk losing those fans. How’d that work out? The Stanley Cup Finals peaked at averaging 4.6 million viewers. The Miami Grand Prix averaged 2.6 million viewers. The Middle Class Trap.

Winners don’t need to innovate but they can if they want. The NFL can bust out the Skycam or the Megalodon camera because they can do whatever they want. Those with nothing to lose do, but they’re already fighting from behind. F1 has done amazing things but they were so far behind other sports in America they’re still nowhere near baseball or basketball. It’s the stagnation of those in the middle – too scared to lose what they have but not scared enough to try and get more – that stifles innovation. It’s why baseball and basketball are more concerned with not losing the fans they have than gaining new ones.

The other, closely related problem, is the dead hand of history. And yes, I tricked you, this is not a standalone but continuing something introduced last week. There is perhaps no single problem for those concerned with innovation that is greater than the dead hand of history. The shortest version of it is that once something is set, it becomes almost impossible to change it. And this is how sports are being used as a metaphor. It takes a couple brief videos to show the dead hand of history in play with how sports are broadcast. Because a half century ago someone put the camera in one place, people get used to that. Now, the idea of slapping cameras on the players and watching the game from their perspective is fantastical. But, is it? If we had the technology to do this in 1952, is this how you would watch the game? This is one example, there’s many ways we can think of how to present a sport. But we go with the one that was technologically easiest in Don Draper’s day. Why? And why do only oil rich dictatorships do grand building programs anymore? Why did it take a pandemic for any changes to our college system? Why do countries – always and forever – fight the last war? It’s all the dead hand of history. We’ll dive into some of those next week. Although if a Ferrari wins at Monza, don’t expect them to be too well written.

1. Americans love our sports to be dramatic and exciting, and as such set them up to maximize this, like the NFL. Europeans aren’t concerned with this. That’s why the F1 champions were all but certain months ago, and four out of the five major European soccer/football leagues have only just kicked off but the champion is all but certain. For example, if you bet $100 on the favorite to win the Super Bowl you’d win $550, and $360 for the World Series. You would need to bet $2,000 to win $100 for the favorites in Germany or $2,500 in France. And they still need to play this out until May. We clearly value different things in sports.

2. Imagine that commercial now. This was only a quarter of a century ago, but it already seems so outdated I’m surprised you don’t see them dragging on a Marlboro.

3. I had to use 1965 instead of 1962 because it’s the earliest I could find on YouTube.

4. Which is still less popular than baseball. Sorry, white guy journalists on Twitter whose identity is based on “loving hoops.”

5. Ed was a graduate of Columbia, received his MFA from NYU, and interned for Warner Brothers. Wait, just kidding, this was back when America innovated, so Ed Sabol was a WWII vet and a raincoat salesman who started his own company. Although he was a world class swimmer who turned down swimming in the 1936 Olympics because he wouldn’t swim in a pool built by Hitler.

6. Roselle, a graduate of Yale with a JD from Harvard Law School – oh, you know where this is going. He was a WWII vet who got his first break in sports while at community college, worked his way up to NFL Commissioner, and then radically changed it into a goliath of business.

7. I also can’t explain how much we loved the letter X in the 1990s.