What do the NFL and NHL share? A hard salary cap. The pressure of staying under a strict budget has changed the way teams build champions. In today’s win-now culture, the pressure of managing a salary cap means that you must play your prospects and draftees on entry-level contracts before they get to the big bucks.

Why the push? Simple. The product is now global, not national or regional. Fans around the world, who support the sport with TV, digitalis and logo revenues, only want to see the star teams and star players. Teams are brands, and their merchandise is sold across the world. The Super League was going to be Broadway and everyone else regional theatre.

Lockdowns have had little, if any, positive effect so far on the virus in North America. But like baseball hitters determined to hit into the shift, the Health Experts® are going to keep employing the lockdown. Hey, who are you going to believe? People hitting .200 on all the major calls of the pandemic or your lying eyes?

Despite MLB’s pretension to a national platform it has become a regional sport, defined by strong rivalries but absent any compelling national voice. While there are wonderful players like Mike Trout and Mookie Betts, none have a national profile à la LeBron or Tom Brady. Its population base is greying at a rapid clip. In the wake of the All Star farce, something has to change.

To say that spring of 2021 is tainted is an understatement. Just as our appreciation of the spring sports rituals has been blunted by the virus, there is another nagging issue with many of our favourite pastimes. As we wrote last October as the Dodgers polished off the World Series, subtlety seems to have been lost in baseball. (And no, we don’t mean MLB interfering in Georgia state politics.)

No one in corporate America or sport notices the contradictions so long as you wear the right sweater or play for the right team in DC. What was once America is becoming East Germany. Just ask the athletes who competed against the GDR’s engineered athletes how that felt.

Luckily for the prime minister few in corporate media want to bring his WE duplicity to light. Funneling money to the Trudeau family (paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the WE organization for speeches between 2016 and 2020) while claiming no complicity is just the price of doing business in Wokeistan. Starving the CFL? Sometimes you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a progressive omelette.

When the transgender rights issue inserted itself in public debate, liberals reflexively shrugged their shoulders and said, “live and let live”. If they want to wear a dress or chemically/ surgically change their physical appearance, that’s their business. That included letting trans people participate in competitive sports in their new identity. The flaw in this genial acceptance became obvious in about 30 seconds.

Walter Gretzky, who passed away this past week at the age of 82, was a visionary in the training of Canadian hockey players, both men and women. He was also an avatar for the future of training the next Wane Gretzky. (Or someone of a slightly lower pedigree.) One of these accomplishments was highly beneficial to the sport The other, inadvertently, has made it more difficult for kids of modest means to achieve a career in hockey.

Play by play on radio is an art form. So is good penmanship. But it doesn’t mean it has a great future. Neither does waiting another year till the prime minister lets people travel and work and go to school. So Jays fans will likely have to grin and bear it as their TV crew tries to satisfy the unsatisfiable.

Dryden’s solution is a reluctant one. “The clever cat-and-mouse game between goalies and shooters has run its constructive course. The goalies, by winning, have changed the game.” So the net must be made bigger. “Maybe only six inches or a foot wider, maybe only six inches higher. And only for those in junior and college leagues and above.”

While it threw considerable resources at chasing down the unicorn cases of 20-year-olds dying of Covid (“It shows we must all lock down and be vigilant”), the titans of journalism never questioned the accuracy of PCR regime— which was a real story. If thewy had they’d find they were peddling a lie.

You know you’ve just blown a wad of dough on a Super Bowl commercial when @washingtonpost is talking about how Bruce Springsteen hawking your Jeeps is killing the planet. In the middle of a blowout win by Tom Brady. It was two-for-one for viewers at #SuperBowlLV . You got a football game and a lecture on Wokeness from Springsteen, BLM and the NFL. How lucky to get a little sports and a lot of coercion.

The Toronto Blue Jays are serial bingers. Every few years their fan base gets fed up with the team owners at Rogers who habitually flip nickels like manhole covers. The management then spends furiously on some big-name free agents or on eye-candy trades to soothe the savage beasts.. There is some improvement. The team makes the playoffs. Then the team slowly morphs back to what it always has done. Trying to pay a quarter for a dollar’s worth of production.

All told, the success rate of the 1979 NHL draft was a staggering one. A whopping 81.7 percent of the selections made that year ended up playing at least one NHL game. The highest rate in a year before that was only 58 percent. In spite of the drama of Wayne Gretzky’s skipping the whole draft process, 1979 still will go down as the most ridiculously stacked draft in NHL history to date.

It was an unsatisfying season at times, but it looks as though the NFL is going to be able to crown a champion at the Super Bowl in early February. Who knows, Tom Brady might win his seventh Super Bowl title, his first with Tampa Bay. Or Southern Ontario’s surrogate team, the Buffalo Bills could win their first title in five SB tries. The CFL wishes. The league that has been awarding the Grey Cup to its champion for 101 years never got out of the blocks last summer. Covid-19 security and financial woes derailed the playing of the 18-game schedule.

Bryson DeChambeau, winner of the U.S. Open, says he worked out so hard that he nearly blacked out on occasion: "There was times where I was seeing a tunnel and I had to stop… A lot of it has to do with pushing the limits of your body and going for long hours of swinging your golf club with a golf ball and trying to help up the ball speed.”

The current uproar over politicians travelling during the holidays— after urging voters not to do so— is yet another example of the “do as I say, not as I do” arrogance of Canada’s nomenklatura in the Lockdown panic. That noblesse oblige extends to forcing hockey players to remain in Canada during the regular season while they head to Hawaii and other warm climes.

Tumultuous doesn’t begin to describe 2020 here at I Don’t Like Mondays. The year began with what we thought was a big scandal— the Houston Astros cheating controversy— and ended with arguments over when athletes should get the “miracle” Covid-19 vaccine. In between the politics of fear ruled the day.

Why is this happening? Because the Covid-19 experience isn’t about Science anymore. It’s about politics, specifically identity politics. Using the pandemic to discredit enemies and buttress authority in the progressive culture. It’s about making sure all colours are accepted as long as they’re red.