Enjoy 2025

  As I begin this installment, it is New Year’s Eve.  By the time I finish it, it will be 2025. But don’t worry, I will stop to celebrate the New Year. 

We enter 2025 with many people full of apprehension. The political landscape, with the change of power at the Presidency and in Congress along with a whole new group of individuals with their own ideologies is in the forefront. Of what will take place in January. The noise that lead up to the election and the post-mortems will only intensify. 

With that backdrop, there is sports to fall back on. NFL. NBA. NHL. MLB. College football. College basketball. And a whole lot of other sports which periodically catch one’s attention. 

For me, the goal is to make that final trip to a baseball field I haven’t seen a game at. That would be Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. I have seen the oldest MLB park a few times while in Boston, even driving close to it. Just not the inside. 

When I ultimately go, I will treasure the fact that I have completed the circuit and seen the colorful interior of the stadium. But I will also gnash my teeth at the absurd tariff attached to the tickets for a game. I agree with my friend that it is much better to drive the three hours to Camden Yards to pay reasonable prices and sit much closer than I ever could in Boston or New York. Besides, I love going through the Harbor Tunnel much more than any bridge or tunnel in Boston, where the drivers are fast and loose. 

The annual New Year’s Day NHL outdoor game was at Wrigley Field, the second oldest MLB park. St. Louis and Chicago banged heads in the cold and rain. 

So it got me thinking about stadiums and outdoor venues. There have been 41 games thus far played in the elements. This is the second time the NHL has opted for Wrigley, as the Blackhawks hosted Detroit in 2009. The second outdoor game for 2025 will be in the Big Horseshoe in Columbus, Ohio when the Red Wings and Blue Jackets collide. 

A few college stadiums have been utilized—so I was thinking why not at Beaver Stadium on the Penn State campus. Or Husky Stadium in Seattle? Or the University of Illinois or University of Missouri? Maybe Florida or Florida State could host a game? The University of Colorado? How about a pro venue like Geha Field at Arrowhead?

My mind also meandered to stadiums I was watching when the NFL was playing. While watching the hapless New York Jets manhandled by the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, I saw the cranes looming over the current field, used to haul in materials for the new stadium which is well underway and would be ready for the 2026 season. A new stadium is being built in Nashville for the Titans with a roof—wouldn’t you think that Orchard Park, New York is the place to have a fixed roof, not in the South?

Proposed stadiums are in the works for the Chicago Bears, Jacksonville Jaguars, Cleveland Browns, with some uncertainty about a new place for the Washington Commanders. With the exception of Cleveland, all the stadiums these teams currently play in are in need of repair; and unlike the Bills, all will be able to close the roof to the elements (and maybe host a Super Bowl or NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship?). Even the ill-fated Jets stadium on Manhattan’s West Side was prudently going to have a roof. 

With the new venues under construction, the capacity will be a bit smaller than what the current arenas hold. Jacksonville will be smaller in its new park, while the Bears will have a larger capacity than ancient Soldier Field holds. 

Which NFL stadium is the biggest? None other than the mausoleum known as Met Life Stadium, shared by the New York Giants and New York Jets, two franchises in the doldrums and then some. Surprisingly, second in capacity is the beautifully reconstructed Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers. Both hold over 81,000 customers when full. 

Yet that is misleading, as #3 on the list, AT&T Stadium, the pride and joy of Dallas owner Jerry Jones, can fit in far more people than its listed capacity. Twelve stadiums can seat over 70,000, which accounts for 14 teams (New York and Los Angeles have shared facilities). 

The smallest? State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. 63,400 is the capacity. Nonetheless, the NFL has that field on its rotating Super Bowl list because it is with a fixed roof in a warm climate, not likely to have weather disruption getting there like in Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Dallas, the latter two cities where winter weather can create absolute havoc. 

Yes, I am a stadium geek. Wherever I go, I love to look at fields or arenas—peering inside through locked gates if I can’t somehow get inside. Given the fact that I have seen nearly every college campus of a major power school, I have seen the arenas and stadiums at each—and a ton of non-Power 5 campuses, too.

I have seen every current NFL stadium except for SoHi—I flew over it when it was being built, as the runways of LAX are nearby. And quite a few stadiums which no longer exist like the Pontiac Silverdome; Detroit’s Tiger Stadium; War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo; Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia; Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh; the two stadiums in St.Louis when the Cardinals played there; and Jack Murphy Stadium, home to the Chargers before they alighted to LA. 

I can go on ad nauseam. I will spare you, the reader, any more details. For I want to touch on another subject. College sports. 

It has hit me a couple of times in December about the absurdity of what is called college athletics. The Name-Image-Likeness pay-for-play atmosphere. The humongous TV money spilled out to the conferences and schools. The transfer portal and the new one-and-done at a school making the player a hired gun for money. 

I come from a Division III background. Where scholarships didn’t exist. Our Division I athletes were wrestlers and they had work grants to subsidize their attending a fine liberal arts college which still fancied itself as part of the upper echelons of Eastern wrestling. 

One of my Franklin and Marshall baseball teammates also played basketball and could easily have played at a Division I level. Except that no one would take him to play two sports. Our shortstop was also the quarterback on the football team. His name adorns the new stadium the football team plays in. There were others in the class following us who played two sports. They came for the athletics and the education. 

We were fortunate that our schedule was only a bit more than 20 games. Now the F&M baseball team plays over 40 regular season games, which will include a trip to California this season. And then there are the playoffs. 

I felt the strain of academics against athletics when I played in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A fair number of professors didn’t care that you were on a team and had a game to travel to three hours away; you had to keep up with your classwork. There were no videos or recordings to substitute what you missed in a lecture. No tutors. You relied on somebody’s notes and hoped for the best. 

Yet we practiced or played every day from the middle of January until nearly the beginning of May. There was off season training and in season supplemental activity. We worked as hard as our compatriots on the Division I level. And our parents were playing top dollar for us to succeed academically and take the next step into a career—whether that meant graduate school or heading straight to work. 

Nobody was getting money to play. No one was thinking about transferring. That wasn’t the mindset. 

Contrast that with the payola atmosphere in college sports today. I thought of the Washington State football team which participated in a bowl game despite more than 20 key players leaving via the portal. Or the Miami quarterback who decided after a half to stop playing to protect his NFL draft status. Really? How do your teammates feel about that?

I watched Columbia come to Piscataway to face Rutgers in men’s basketball. The no-scholarship Lions fought gamely but were no match for the Scarlet Knights, a team which has two players receiving huge NIL money and destined for the NBA after a year while also on scholarship. I am willing to bet that after 10 years, if you compare the squads and what their livelihoods will be—maybe the RU duo will have made a lot of money but the CU guys will be more advanced in their chosen careers, thanks to the education they took advantage of. 

Not everyone is Lebron James, who at 40 years old has accomplished so much foregoing college to play in the NBA. Maybe even King James might have gone to school for a year to get the kind of money now thrown at 17 and 18 year olds to play for dear old U. 

I don’t want to necessarily poison your enjoyment of intercollegiate sports—there are plenty of kids who go on to fantastic careers once they graduate which don’t necessarily involve sports and aren’t buttressed by NIL opportunities. Yet I thought of how many players in the CFP quarterfinal game between Penn State and Boise State have NIL money and are or will be products of the transfer portal. 

The almighty dollar has always been the evil of college sports. Add in the permissive betting which attaches to sports and it is a ravenous atmosphere which eats up and spits out kids who play the games. 

I watched the University of Washington quarterback, tearful after his team failed to convert a two point conversion to defeat Louisville in the absurdly-named Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl (the winning coach was showered with Frosted Flakes instead of a Gatorade bath). For a second, I felt sorry for him. Then I wondered if he was being paid big bucks to play on a prestigious Big Ten team one year removed from the national championship game or if he had already utilized the transfer portal. 

I can’t help but be highly cynical about what is going on at the collegiate level. A lot of regulation is warranted. Provided the schools and their bosses, the networks, want to reel in the quagmire which has been created. Instead, they and their alumni are too busy whining about why their school might have been excluded from the playoffs. 

Watch all the sports you want. But think of those kids from the Ivy League or those retired, successful F&M baseball players—a couple of attorneys, doctors and a plethora of businessmen—playing for the love of the game, accumulating debt with higher tuition costs, while having a real goal in life. 

Enjoy 2025.  Just think—I haven’t even mentioned Juan Soto, Taylor Swift, the Kelces, Mannings or the Detroit Lions.