Famous sportswriter Alexander Wolff once said, “I deplore dynasties for the same reasons critics rip a formulaic movie: stock characters, predictable plot.”
In this day and age, we can skip past stale or boring moments with the click of a button or a flick of the wrist. We no longer have the time to wait for that moment of excitement, and we refuse to watch boring sports.
Even in quarantine, people love to watch their favorite teams play their eternal rival in a fierce battle of skills and wits. When people are stuck in their homes, one of the only ways they can return to normality is by watching their favorite sports.
Now, in possibly the world’s darkest hour, we can’t afford to watch uninteresting sports. It is one of few outlets that people have left, and we cannot let one-sided matches and dynasties quell the legacies of our favorite teams and players.
In the 70’s, the Pittsburgh Steelers won an unrivaled four Super Bowls in six years, and in the 1976 season, they shut out five different teams. Even to this day, according to sports writer Richard Hoffer, they have the legacy of being one of the most dominant football teams of all time.
As a lifelong Steelers fan, I understand the reverence that a team’s community has around their era of being a dynasty, but being as young as I am, I have been able to witness another dynasty in football, the Patriots.
For me, the slog of toiling through 17+ weeks of football just for the inevitable Super Bowl victory by Tom Brady is not fun to watch. Untouched through the controversies and overall shady nature of the organization, year after year, the aptly named “Deflate-triots” came out on top.
Now with some retrospective on these fallen titans, I realized that their defeats at the hands of the Eagles, Giants, Packers, and Bears were legendary moments in NFL history. Despite this, since 2014, the Patriots 4th Super Bowl win, the Super Bowl’s TV ratings, according to Statistia, has tanked, a shred of the sport’s former glory.
This is not only a theme of football, but in the entire sports world. Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel have won eleven out of the last thirteen F1 World Championships. Mercedes have won the last seven F1 World Championships, easily looking to add more and more.
When teams spend so much money to build and race these cars, the way Mercedes has pulled ahead is remarkable. Although this feat of engineering dominance and racing skill is astonishing, it comes at a cost. Formula One has lost 250 million annual viewers since 2008, which was Lewis Hamilton’s first championship run, again from Statistia.
This absolute dominance harkens back to the days of the sports legends, such as Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, and Lewis’s main comparison and “rival,” Micheal Schumacher. Lewis’s last championship was won by 124 points, almost five whole first place races. This is a dangerous place for the sport, arguably the most exciting race was the one where Lewis didn’t even compete.
Seeing such a familiar face win every race begins to grow disdain among fans and the community as a whole believes Oliver Brown of the “London Daily Telegraph.” When this cycle continues, fans begin to lose interest and tune out, damaging the sport.
Take the NBA, the Warriors went to the NBA finals against LeBron James and his Cavs for four straight years, only to be usurped a couple of years later by Lebron James and the Lakers!
“Sports fans crave two major tenets and those are entertainment and unpredictability. … [this is why] match-fixing – the removal of unpredictability – is such a heinous crime in the eyes of fans,” said Ed Maylon, sports editor at the “Independent.”
Dynasties take away that element of awe, and in my poll small of middle school sports fans, when given the choice, none of them said that games where one team dominated were interesting to watch.
In reality, sports dynasties are not the Ragnarok that some make them out to be, but they still have long lasting negative effects.
Sports are a universal language that unites people all over the world. These leagues rely on millions of people to stay afloat, and millions of people rely on these leagues for their jobs and livelihoods.
Who knows when Lewis Hamilton will finally lose, or when LeBron James hangs up his shoes? We do know this. Unless something is done, these dynasties will keep damaging the people, leagues, and sports that we all love.