Chip Shots: Dish on the Commish

Chip Shots
A Sports Blog

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I'm Chip Ramsey a career broadcaster who has been a sports radio program director in Milwaukee and Nashville. I've covered everything from high school and college sports (including the SEC, Big Ten, MVC and OVC) to Major League Baseball, The NFL and the NHL. I have a few things to say, and when I want to say them, I say them here.

I mostly talk about my teams, which would be the White Sox, Bears, and Blackhawks, but I do talk about other things as well. Thanks for dropping by. I hope you will bookmark this site and visit often!

Chip's broadcast career

Chip Shots: Dish on the Commish

Dish on the Commish

I was thinking the other day about the commissioners of four major sports (yes, i still consider hockey a major sport.) I wanted to rank them from worst to first. Here's what I came up with:

4. Gary Bettman NHL:The things that this man has done to a once proud sport are many and heinous. During Bettman's reign, hockey has gone from a winter alternative to basketball to the crapper with it's popularity slightly ahead of poker, the X-games and soccer. Bettman's three biggest blunders were expanding the league to a point where the play is so watered down no one can recognize it; presiding over a year long work stoppage that almost eliminated the sport completely and over valuing his product to ESPN. ESPN may not need hockey, but hockey sure needs them. Bettman has also tried to change the things hockey fans love most like close games, great goaltending, close checking and fighting. There's an old joke that David Stern volunteered Bettman to run the NHL so he could eliminate it from the public radar. Looks like Dave was right.
3. Bud Selig-MLB: I'm not buying into the Bud is a great commish argument. Even though baseball is profitable and well loved, Selig was captaining the ship in 1994 when the post season was canceled. He was in charge during all of the steroid years and if he is as smart as some people give him credit for, he obviously knew what was going on and did little to stop it. Selig tried to eliminate teams, even competitive ones, a couple of years ago to save money. His halting of the all-star game a few years ago was a joke. He basically is a puppet of the owners, which the owners love, but he still gets his lunch handed to him from the MLBPA, the most powerful union on earth. Integrity and Bud Selig should never appear in the same sentence.
2. David Stern-NBA: The longest serving of the commish, Stern has had his share of ups and downs, but generally moves quickly and decisively to not only fix things but take out his enemies as well. The man is ruthless. When the NBA was on strike, the NBA threatened arenas and networks not to help the women's ABL basketball league or fear his wrath when the NBA started back up. The league folded by Christmas. Stern has little control over a league with a bad image problem. While the NBA was hot in the 80's and '90's, lack of compelling and marketable players have screeched its growth to a halt, not to mention a slew of franchise transfers, threatened franchise transfers or just plain bad NBA markets. The problems that the NBA faces now are more the fault of evolution than David Stern.
1. Roger Goodell-NFL: The jury is still out as Goodell is fairly new at his job, but he certainly takes discipline seriously. What may be his downfall is NFL arrogance with the NFL network and the NFL's insistence that 24/7/365 access to Rich Eisen is valuable to cable customers who don't want to pay for it. Goodell also wants to play games on a world stage which defeats the fact that American football in Europe is like soccer over here and by playing game s in London and Tokyo he is depriving season ticket holders of seeing games here.