The Sanity Code, Eras of Stadium Construction, and the Impacts of Competing Leagues

INSTRUCTIONS
For each paper you will answer the presented questions. Your answers must be comprehensive and be supported with current sport-related examples. Critical thinking must be demonstrated in each answered question. Write your thoughts out effectively as you complete the reading assignments. Do not answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to any of the questions.
 Each question must be answered with no less than 200 words.
 Each assignment should include a separate title page, the body of your paper and a separate reference page.
 APA (American Psychological Association) Format should be used to complete these assignments
 All answers must be compiled in a Word document.
 Times New Roman, 12- point font, and double spaced throughout.
 List ALL references, including your scriptural references using current APA mechanics.
 Each question must include references to support your answer.
 Textbook support should be limited to two or three citations per question.
 At least 1 reference in addition to the course textbook.
 A scriptural reference that is related to the topic.
 Acceptable sources include.
 Scholarly articles published within the last five years.
 Any Biblical translation.
Note: Each assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.
Research Paper:
Stadiums, Leagues, and Professionalism Assignment
Please answer 3 of the 5 questions listed below.
1. Explain the Sanity Code. Why was it approved by the NCAA national convention? Was it successful?
2. Compare and contrast the different eras of stadium construction. Be sure to include factors such as financing, location, and design.
3. Assess the contribution and impacts of competing leagues, such as the AFL, ABA, and USFL.
4. Pick one of the following and discuss its development and struggles: NASCAR, NHL, MLS.
5. Outline the changing views towards professionalism in the Olympics from Pierre de Coubertin to the present. How and why have views changed? Who is responsible?
01 07:58 Reading Below
"Sports in American Life: A History"
Richard O. Davies
12
PLAY FOR pay: PROFESSIONAL SPORTS IN AMERICA
Prior to the introduction of commercial television, only professional baseball enjoyed widespread popularity. Television helped undercut “America's Pastime” to the point where its popularity fell behind professional football. Professional basketball enjoyed a surge of popularity, and even for a time hockey and soccer enthusiasts thought that with nationwide expansion their sports would become another spectator sport with broad appeal.
The story of professional sports is much more than the games played, because they became enmeshed in a continuum of labor disputes and aggravating strikes, the movement of franchises from city to city by owners seeking sweeter financial deals, and endless jousting with television networks for extended coverage and higher audience ratings. Although sports fans focused on game scores and championships won and lost, businessmen operated those teams and depended upon inordinately skilled athletes who were supremely interested in the size of their paychecks and job security, just like employees everywhere.
A Tale of Three Cities
Cleveland is a football town. Its population is descended from immigrants who came to work in its bustling mills, foundries, factories, and refineries during the two great human migrations that transformed the United States. Between 1865 and 1914, 25 million people left their homes in eastern and southern Europe for America, and between the 1890s and the 1960s, an estimated 15 million rural southerners left small towns and farms in the South for the urban North and West. From the moment the Cleveland Browns played their first games in the new All-American Football Conference in 1946, residents of the city and the surrounding region enthusiastically supported the team. On autumn Sundays, 70,000 fans flocked to aging and decrepit Municipal Stadium – the much criticized “Mistake by the Lake” – to cheer for their team. More popular than the baseball Indians, and clad in orange, brown, and white, the Browns epitomized this hard-nosed industrial city and its ethnically and racially diverse population.
After an extended championship-filled run under coach Paul Brown, young owner Art Modell fired him in 1963, and the fortunes of the team fell into decline soon thereafter, mirroring the sagging economy of this prototypical Rust Belt City. The Browns won their last NFL championship in 1964 on the strength of the running of Jim Brown and the talented squad Paul Brown left behind. Soon thereafter, Cleveland had entered into a devastating economic decline and become the butt of comedians' jokes about a Cuyahoga River so polluted with industrial waste that it actually caught on fire in 1969 (the evening news showed the improbable picture of city firemen squirting water on a river to put out ugly toxic flames).1
From the perspective of 2001, Cleveland native Joe Posnanski recalled:
The old Browns were the heartbeat of old Cleveland. Lives were built around those Browns. All week long, they were the pulse that kept the town going. Monday you reviewed the game, Tuesday you argued who should be quarterback, Wednesday you wondered why they were not getting sacks, Thursday you called into the radio station to be the ninth caller and win those tickets, Friday you were in love. ... And the games on Sunday were like nothing else. It was always 25 degrees colder inside old Cleveland Stadium and ... you screamed against the wind. Cleveland Browns football was everything. Everything.2
Even the futility of mediocre Browns teams (as well as the baseball Indians) and watching the rival Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates enjoy extended championship runs during the 1970s did not deter the Browns' faithful. During the 1980s, on three separate agonizing occasions, the Browns were thwarted in playoff games just short of the Super Bowl: in 1980, Oakland intercepted a Brian Sipe PASS deep in Raider territory; in 1987 Denver Broncos' quarterback John Elway engineered a last-minute 98-yard drive to tie the game and set up a Denver overtime victory; and the following year Browns' running back Ernie Byner was heading for the tying touchdown when a tackler stripped him of the ball at the two-yard line. After those disasters, Browns fans had good reason to believe their team was suffering from a diabolical curse. “In Cleveland, in those days,” Posnanski recalls, “there was desperation. When the Browns won, you felt alive. When they lost, you were left with snow piled halfway up your window and potholes the size of Olympic swimming pools and a million gray days and a million Cleveland jokes.”3
This special connection between team and town ended abruptly on November 6, 1995. On that day, Modell announced he was moving the Browns to Baltimore, citing a lucrative offer from city and state officials that included $65 million in up-front money to cover transition costs, the construction of a 70,000-seat stadium that his team would use rent-free, and substantial supplemental income from luxury box rental, seat licenses, parking, concessions, and stadium advertising. Modell was peeved at Cleveland's politicians: a new baseball park had been built for the Indians and a new arena for the basketball Cavaliers, while his demands for a modern stadium had been ignored.4
Incredulity and shock swept through northern Ohio, and it produced a tsunami of angry recriminations. In 1961, the 34-year-old Modell convinced a Cleveland bank to loan him $4 million to buy the Browns. Over the years, he was viewed as a popular community leader, but that ended abruptly with his shocking announcement. Radio talk show lines lit up as fans excoriated the pariah. Angry messages, including a few death threats, were furiously dispatched. Newspaper editorials denounced Modell's greed and perfidy. Politicians from city council to the US Senate gave fiery speeches and city officials hustled a team of lawyers into court in a futile effort to stop the move. Resolutions came streaming out of city government, clergy preached sermons about the sacred value of community and personal trust, and conversations at local watering holes were animated. What Modell failed to appreciate, Posnanski lamented, was that “The Cleveland Browns weren't a football team. They were religion and family and history and the only pride of a city that had taken too many punches.”5
The NFL agreed to put a new expansion team in Cleveland by 1999, and Modell permitted the expansion franchise to retain team colors, name, and 50 years of records. A public contest in Baltimore renamed his franchise the Ravens in recognition of the city's brooding writer Edgar Allan Poe. While Cleveland fans felt terribly violated, giddy Baltimore was repaid for the loss they had suffered when their Colts – the storied franchise that in 1958 had ridden the powerful right arm of legendary Johnny Unitas to the NFL championship in the “greatest game ever played” – had literally left town in the middle of the night in 1984. For several years, the Colts' irascible owner Robert Irsay had been demanding that Maryland taxpayers build his team a new stadium, but when a grouchy Maryland legislature PASSed a bill that permitted the state to use its power of eminent domain to wrest control of the team away from the owner, Irsay decided to take the best offer. It came from Mayor Thomas Hudnut of Indianapolis, who was seeking a tenant for the new 65,000-seat Hoosier Dome. Irsay accepted his offer after learning of impending legal action by the Maryland attorney general that would have tied his team up in court for years. In the dead of night, to avoid a possible court injunction the next day, workers frantically loaded office files and equipment, film and projectors, team uniforms, even weight-training equipment, onto a fleet of 12 moving vans. Not until the last van had crossed state lines did Mayor Hudnut announce that the Baltimore Colts were now the Indianapolis Colts. In response to irate Maryland fans, Irsay snapped, “This is my team. I own it, and I'll do whatever I want with it.”6
It was more than a decade before Baltimore again became the host city of an NFL team. In 1995, a journalist reported that 37 of the existing 113 professional teams “came from somewhere else.” Noting that over the course of 33 years Art Modell had become a symbol of stability in the NFL, and had openly opposed awarding an expansion franchise to Baltimore just two years previously, another journalist concluded, “What makes the Modell move so galling [is that] Modell is so mainstream in the league ... the thinking goes that if Modell goes, anybody will go.”7 Modell became the toast of the town in Baltimore, but he wisely never returned to Cleveland. But