OK, hands up everybody who knows the relegation system of Barclay’s Premier League. Nobody? No worries I gotcha covered. As the Associated Press reports (and I got this from Sports Illustrated btw):
Newcastle and Middlesbrough were relegated from the Premier League on Sunday, while Hull and Sunderland stayed up.
Newcastle lost 1-0 at Aston Villa and Middlesbrough was beaten 2-1 at West Ham to finish in the last three teams on the final day of the league season.
Hull lost 1-0 to newly crowned champion Manchester United and Sunderland went down 3-2 at home to third-place Chelsea.
Last-place West Bromwich Albion was already certain to go down and drew 0-0 at Blackburn.
If this will insult your intelligence as a “football” fan, then feel free to skip to the next paragraph. Let me quickly go through the idea of relegation: The 3 bottom-placed teams at the end of each season of the Premier League are busted down to what amounts to kind of a minor league system. The 3 top teams from that league take the place of the losers from the Premier League. Thus, the bottom of the roster in the Premier League changes quite a bit from season to season.
So let me propose an idea here. Relegation is something that basically doesn’t exist here stateside. But I think there’s an argument to be made that it could be advantageous to install something like that in some of the more inflated sports leagues we have. Remember when your favorite baseball team won the World Series? If you live in the north side of Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Texas, or Seattle you probably weren’t around for the last time your team even appeared in one.
I’m not saying that those cities didn’t have good baseball teams, they’ve had some on and off years but overall it’s been quite a long time of blah. The MLB has always seemed a bit overcrowded, but with profitable markets available in various countries in North America, there shouldn’t be any shortage of places to put in some new teams either.
Is it crazy to propose that we make a new kind of minor league? One without the farm system motivations and rehab purposes for the major league teams, but instead housing whatever teams are unable to make the cut each season. This a revolutionary idea I suppose and it might be coming out because I haven’t shaved in a week, but I think it’s an interesting idea, one not to be tossed out without a bit of consideration.
On that same note, this could work within the NBA as well. It may even be a better fit, considering the similarities between the NBA season schedule and the Premier League; it’d certainly make watching the Clippers against the Bucks a bit more interesting. Anyway, what do you think? I’m not so sure it’ll ever happen, but it could be pretty fun.
