The requisite Super Bowl post

and still good designers can't find work. Go figure.

Actually, I don’t do Super Bowl posts. I don’t even do football posts. But thanks to Political Irony and Bill Maher’s New Rules, I have learned there’s an angle of interest to me, an entirely new angle on this ‘ball game’ business. I learned the freaky scary truth about the NFL . They’re commies! Run-for-the-frackin’-hills!

A week ago, I posted about a New Rules bit in which Maher compared baseball and football in terms of popularity and earnings. He pointed out that football – the clear winner  – is run on a ‘take from the rich, give to the poor’ model.  The NFL, he said “put all of it [television revenue] in a big commie pot and split it 32 ways [among the teams].

We learn more from Political Irony: Take the Green Bay Packers who have won more NFL championships than any other team. How do they do this? Do they pay their players more? No! In fact, they have the lowest median salary in the NFL. Do they represent a big city? No! Green Bay (population 100,000) is the smallest city to have a major league football team. Their games always fill their stadium (which can hold 70% of the entire city population) and they have a waiting list for season tickets that could more than fill another stadium just as large.

So how do they do it? Most people don’t realize this, but the Green Bay Packers are a non-profit community-owned organization. You can buy stock in them, but it does not pay dividends, and it never increases in value. It is a worthless investment, and yet they have 112,000 shareholders (more than the population of Green Bay).

In other words, the Green Bay Packers are socialists (maybe even communists). As conservatives keep telling us, socialism never works and will destroy our economy. And yet the Green Bay Packers are consistently one of the top ten revenue generating teams in the NFL (so the socialists are supporting the capitalist teams!). According to the conservatives, taxing the successful and supporting the unsuccessful will destroy the incentive to win.

And yet the Green Bay Packers keep on winning.

In talking about baseball, Maher pointed to The Pittsburgh Pirates and how they lose their audience every year in May when it becomes clear – as it always does – that the team have no chance of making it to the World Series. They have no chance, Maher said, because the Pirates payroll is $46million and the Yankees payroll is $140million. They’re not playing in the same league. Only the rich teams get a shot at the prize.  Maher closed, saying “If you’re not in the game, you become indifferent to the fate of the game.”

 Something to keep in mind as the class divide in our country grows ever deeper.