By TERRY LYONS, Editor in Chief of Digital Sports Desk
BOSTON – Long before we needed passwords for every single thing we do online, and long before all the passwords needed a double authentication via a mobile phone or additional email, there was a TV Show called, “Password.” It ran on CBS from 1961 until 1967, then switched to ABC for a nice run from 1971 to 1975. After that, it popped-up in a few different iterations.
None were as good as the original Mark Goodson-Bill Todman produced, and Allen Ludden hosted version. Ludden has an interesting yet sad backstory. He was born in 1917, the son of Elmer Ellsworth, an ice dealer who fell ill by the Spanish flu and died at age 26. Ludden’s mother remarried and, at age five, the youngster took on the name of his new father, Homer J. Ludden, an electrical engineer.
Allen Ludden graduated from the University of Texas-Austin with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and he served in the Army, then took a job as program director for WCBS, utilizing his skills from being the Army’s entertainment man for the Pacific theatre of the war. Ludden married Margaret McGloin on October 11, 1943, but she died of cancer in 1961. He then proposed to the great Betty White, a regular he met on Password. It took two or three proposals for Ms. White to accept. They were married on June 6, 1963 and remained so until Ludden’s early death at age 63, losing a battle with stomach cancer.
Before his death, there was a memorable episode of “The Odd Couple” when Ludden and White guest starred in their on air “Password” roles.
Aristophanes …
Ridiculous!
(That’s an inside joke related to THIS.)
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Today, the Password is RELEGATION.
Relegation is an accepted practice in England’s Premier League, certainly the top tier of global futbol (we’ll call it soccer from now on). This season (2024-25), three teams from the Premiership will be relegated to Championship level. The three relegated clubs will transfer back the share certificates that gave them Premier League status, and the Premier League Board will confirm the cancellation of those shares at their annual summer meetings. The rule reads as follows:
“The teams who finish the season in the bottom three places of the Premier League table – 18th, 19th and 20th – drop down to the Championship, the second tier of English football. Those teams are replaced in the Premier League for the following season by three promoted clubs – the sides who finish first and second in the Championship, plus the winners of that division’s end-of-season playoffs.”
While Ipswich, Leicester and Southampton’s relegation will be officially confirmed this summer, two other clubs will be promoted (Leeds United and Burnley) and a third will be named from the upcoming Championship level playoffs.
Keep in mind, in 2015-16, Leicester won the Premier League and now the club finds itself in the equivalent of Triple A baseball.
The obvious question abounds: Would relegation ever work in North American professional sports? In short, the answer is a resounding no. Using the NBA as an example, when a team is purchased, they enter into a Joint Partnership Agreement with the other franchise owners. With that comes agreed upon draft choices, television money shares and all other benefits (NBA merchandising rights, etc). These days, teams are going for some $6 billion, so there’s zero chance of an agreement to be made to undercut that investment. The same goes for the NFL, MLB and NHL.
A secondary example – call it an idea – recently surfaced and it came from within the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Stanford men’s basketball coach Kyle Smithsuggested the ACC adopt a Premier League-like system for ACC basketball, according to the Washington Post of April 18.
The ACC sent only four teams to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, a low for the conference that lives and breathes hoops. Smith’s idea is to create divisions within the ACC so the top teams play each other more often and thus have a chance for the Quad-1 victory – the kind the NCAA men’s committee values when selecting the tournament’s at-large participants.
With 18 teams in the ACC, that would mean two divisions of nine — Smith’s ideal version – or – not as desirable – three divisions of six. With two divisions, the bottom two teams of the top tier would move down every year, and the top two of the second tier would move up. With three divisions, one program would get relegated from each of the top two tiers, meaning two programs would get promoted. Smith’s idea for relegation is really promotions within two or three divisions, never a ticket down to say – the Southern Conference – for a stint. All clubs would remain ACC member teams and benefit from the Conference as a whole, never mind compete in all the other sports – both men’s and women’s.
Said Smith to the WaPo: “The ACC, we’re struggling for a place in the marketplace,” he said while in San Antonio for the 2025 Final Four. “We need to be the first ones to do something like this. The big boys, the SEC and Big Ten, are trying to take over. Put some pressure on them and the Big 12, too. This is the ACC! The ACC is basketball. So you come out and say: ‘We’re going to relegate teams to raise excitement and get back on top.’
“We might need to think of a better word than relegation,” Smith admitted. “You know, it could sting. But that’s what it would be! Relegation! And if we try it and it doesn’t work, what’s the worst case? We get four teams in the tournament? That just happened.”
TL’s Take: Re, Rel, Rele, Relegation would be a terrible idea for the major USA/Canada pro sports leagues but a very interesting idea for collegiate conferences. But, that only seems to relate to the mega-sized college conferences of 15+ teams. Going forward, more conferences might be forced to merge and – if that is the case – a college basketball conference of 18-30 member institutions, a new system would need to be developed. It wouldn’t work for a basketball conference like the BIG EAST with 11 member schools. And, it would NEVER work for the IVY League conference. Can you imagine if Harvard or Yale had a few bad seasons and were sent down to play against the “Little Ivy” schools like Amherst College, Wesleyan University and Williams College?
All that said, there is an incredible story about the opposite side of relegation, that being the three consecutive years of promotion gained by Wrexham of Wales, the club which became the first team in English football history to achieve three consecutive promotions. That dates all the way back to 1888. Franchise co-owner Ryan Reynolds of Canadian-American acting fame, said that his club is charting a course for the Premier League.
“Our goal is to make it to the Premier League,” Reynolds said. “It just seemed like an impossible dream – when he bought the club in February 2021 – but as storytellers, you look as much as you can at the macro view of history.”
HERE NOW, THE NOTES: A great Titan of Trinity and all-around tremendous friend, dating back to the mid-70s, is Jim Johnson, the executive director of Hockey Hall of Famer Pat LaFontaine’s Companions in Courage. More than one million pediatric patients and their families have benefited from the work done through LaFontaine and his foundation www.CiC16.org of which JJ oversees on a day-to-day basis. Says Johnson, “We’re in the process of providing new interactive rooms in Connecticut, Long Island and upstate New York. Plus, we are providing sensory devices, stuffed animals and upbeat videos to enhance the healing process at children’s hospitals across North America.
“I’d like to invite you to a wonderful night of upbeat jazz and friendship as we present a “Concert for COURAGE,” on Friday, May 30th at 8:00pm (ET) at the Adelphi University Performing Arts Center in Garden City, Long Island. Tickets are available for under $30.
Jazz keyboardist, Al DeGregoris and his All-Star ensemble, is known for incredible high-energy performances that “will have you moving all night long,” promised JJ. Hockey Hall of Famer Pat LaFontaine will be on hand and he’ll be joined by a few old friends. To purchase tickets: Click HERE.
THINK: Former NBA colleagues John Kosner and Ed Desser frequently pen some thought leadership pieces for our friends at the Sports Business Journal. The most recent opinion delves into this week’s NCAA rulings on the pending House antitrust judgement (expected July 1st) and its effect on college sports.
So say John and Ed: “As college athletics becomes more professionalized, we believe athletic directors need to think: vision, best practices and providing the right incentives for their students and institutions.
“For starters, the sky isn’t falling. Intercollegiate athletics remains crucial to all who participate, watch and cheer — and consider matriculating. College football is more popular than ever; men’s and especially women’s basketball are ascending, as are women’s sports such as softball, volleyball and gymnastics, which fuel Olympic sports globally. Sports media value and importance continues growing.
Thus, July 1 presents an opportunity to think differently.”
For the full column, Click HERE.
TL’s Take: I agree 100% with John and Ed that the collegiate administrators need to stop complaining and own the next chapter in competitive collegiate sports. It’s either that, or fold the cards and offer intramural sports for your students and stay on campus.
For too long, collegiate administrators were pointing the fingers, nay-saying everything professional sports was doing to their “amateur student athletes.” Meanwhile, FedEx envelopes were criss-crossing the nation, paying off athletes under the table. It was the “NBA’s fault” that players would come out early, they’d complain, ignoring the legal Robertson Settlement Agreement of 1970 and subsequent Haywood vs. National Basketball Association (1971) that called “for a significant number of high school graduates and college attendees to make themselves eligible for the NBA Draft as long as their senior year of high school had passed. At the time, the NBA allowed for the “hardship draft” to exist allowing for circumstances to determine the need for a player to turn pro and become a primary income source to benefit his family. That provision stood for few years before it was abolished by the 1976 NBA Draft in relation to the NBA-ABA absorption. In Collective Bargaining, it was exchange for allowing college underclassmen to join the rest of the draft eligible players so long as their high school class had graduated and they declare their intent to forgo remaining college basketball eligibility to enter the NBA Draft.”
It was never “an NBA rule,” but rather a key point in a legally agreed upon Collective Bargaining Agreement with the NBA Players Association. Collegiate basketball coaches would be sure to make their fans think otherwise.
That brings us to today, some 55 years after the fact, the NCAA and its member schools are looking at legal proceedings which allow for players to be paid to attend and also to make significant income from their Name, Image and Likeness, as determined by O’Bannon vs. NCAA. Thus, the golden goose of having a full sports business entity operating without having to pay the players has vanished. No longer is the promise of an athletic scholarship an adequate mechanism of bargaining with an athlete. It’s time for the colleges to adapt.
This coming week, the University of Kentucky will ask its board of trustees to approve a plan to convert its entire athletic department into an LLC, a move the school says will position it to adapt to the new world of collegiate sports.
Champions Blue, the name of the school’s proposed Limited Liability Company, would allow Kentucky to create a public-private partnership and raise funds and handle expenses as collegiate sports shifts into the new era.
