Baseball Should Have a Salary Cap Period!

I used to be one of the biggest baseball fans around when I was little and even all the way up to my senior year of high school. My ultimate goal while growing up was to be a professional baseball player and to be apart of the MLB. Now my opinion has dramatically changed because of what baseball has become. Right now i could probably tell you who is going to be in the playoffs next year and which teams will win the respective wild card for each league. Teams like Boston, New York, and the Dodgers who have ridiculous salaries just make me sick. Last year the 3 top free agents signed with the New York Yankees and as a result they won the World Series. In any other sport i.e. Basketball, thats like saying Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Kobe Bryant will all sign with the Lakers next year. Wow what a team that would be, but because of a salary cap that will not happen unless the player would willing to take a pay cut or the owner would want to pay a huge luxury tax. So when the Yankees did win the World Series this year, was anyone really surprised? I know I wasn't. What has baseball done to even out the playing field for the low market teams? Well they make the high market teams pay a tax of some kind to the lower market teams to help them out. Most of the money goes to paying for other expenses and not for new free agents. The Yankees are exempt from this tax because they built their new stadium and they have a deal with the MLB. It makes me sick when teams like the Cleveland Indians have to trade their Cy young winner back to back years because they cannot afford to pay them the huge contract dollars they want. Plus they have to do by the all star break which means half of the season is still left and they are getting rid of all their good veteran talent. Then the Indians go and trade a player like Victor Martinez who loved playing in Cleveland because they were trying to shed salary. I am just fed up with baseball and will probably not pay much attention to it anymore until they figure out how to even the playing field.

College Football Playoff

I know this is a huge topic of debate between any college football fan. Whether or not College football should incorporate a playoff system to determine the National Championship. I for one am in favor of this movement towards a playoff system. Over the last 5 years the debate has become an even more heated and teams from smaller conferences are getting better. You look at the top ten teams this year as of right now they go as follow:
1.Florida 6.Boise State
2.Alabama 7.Georgia Tech
3.Texas 8.LSU
4.TCU 9.Pittsburgh
5.Cincinnati 10.Ohio State

I agree with these ranking for the most part but what is not shown is their records. The top 6 have records of 10-0 and if they win their remaining games they will stay the same, that is with the exception of the SEC championship game which will make either Alabama or Florida with a loss assuming they take care of business on Saturday.Then we have 5 teams who will remain undefeated, and only two will have a shot at the title. Now the unwritten rule seems to be if you go undefeated in the regular season, you go to the title game. This will not be the case if it happens this year with those 5 respected teams.
I look at the past few National title games especially the ones in which the Buckeyes were in. They had no business being in the title game when they played LSU. This is coming from a die hard Buckeye fan too. The only reason we were in that game is because we won our last few games and some of the more deserving teams had a slip up at the end of the season. All the coaches seem to preach finishing the end of the season on a high note because if you lose early, you can always make your way back up to the top. Then when Oklahoma got beat by Boise State in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl who maybe should have deserved a shot at the National title game. The problem is there is too much money invested in the BCS Bowl games and when schools are receiving in excess of 8 million dollars for making it to the big game, I can see why they are content on the system.
Here is my idea of a playoff system. Take the top 8 teams in the BCS and set them up in a bracket playing on a neutral field and play out the bracket till you get to the big game. There will be a week between each game just like the regular season to give teams time to prepare. That will eliminate the 4-5 week period before the big game to watch more football. The teams will remain fresh and in shape instead of looking rusty when starting the game.

Players lives being intruded by the media

Nick and Shaun had their ethical issues presentation the other day asking the question of whether or not the media should be allowed to intrude the personal lives of athletes. I think the media should be restricted to as how far they can go when trying to get a story or take the next big time picture of a celebrity doing something wrong. It gets to the point where an athlete can’t even sit down in a restaurant and enjoy time with their families because once they walk in or out pictures are being taken. The problem is the average Joe wants to see celebrities or athletes fall from the ranks of high society because we paint this picture of them as being a role model and when they do not live up to it society loves coming down on them. We need to realize that even though they are athletes and people do look up to them, they are people as well and people make mistakes. I have made plenty of mistakes in my life that I have learned from but the only people who know about it are the ones around me. For an athlete, if they make a mistake the whole country knows about it. Sometimes I think it gets to the point where some athletes are not themselves because their PR representative or organization does not want them getting into to trouble or saying the wrong thing. Money is usually lost in some way when something comes up with an athlete.

Then you have things happening like athletes houses getting broken into because the media does some story about how big their house is and what is in it. Incidents like Sean Taylor getting killed while getting robbed might not have happened. The problem is I do not think this problem with the media intruding lives of athletes can be stopped. The reason being is with everyone having a cell phone with a camera on it everyone becomes part of the media. You look at Matt Leinhart’s pictures with the beer bong and Michael Phelps smoking bong, those pictures were taken by people like you and me who probably got a nice sum of money from the media so they could publish the story. If anything athletes will have to be even more cautious of their actions outside of their home because you never know who might be out there trying to ruin the athletes life by taking a picture of something an average person may have done but because they are athletes it is worth money and money always talks.