The 3 Most Overvalued Things in Sports

Buy low, sell high, or better yet don’t buy at all

Photo by Omar Ramadan on Unsplash

1. Corner kicks in soccer.

What percentage of corner kicks result in goals? What percentage even lead to anything close to a goal? More likely, a defender will head the ball out of play and then the whole pointless activity will be repeated from the opposite corner. Or even better, no one from either side will touch the ball and it will bounce harmlessly off the pitch.

Why do people think corner kicks are exciting? Probably because so few real scoring chances occur in a soccer match. Well, guess what, the next corner kick isn’t a scoring chance either. So, if there’s a corner kick coming up it’s a good time to go to the bathroom. Or make a sandwich. Go ahead, you won’t miss anything.

Let’s face it, corner kicks are the false labor of sports. If a corner kick were a soccer player his name would be Braxton Hicks.

(By the way, the answers to questions above are: around three percent of corner kicks result in goals and about 1 in 5 end up with a shot on goal.)

Speaking of false labor . . .

2. The NFL Draft.

Never has so much been said by so many about so little. Even though any NFL team’s success or failure for a given draft year is not determined until at least three years after that draft, “experts” still spend hours predicting who will get drafted when and by whom, hours covering every second of this now three-day event and then hours more “grading” each team’s draft when it’s all finally over.

(And now there are analysts who grade the “experts” on the accuracy of their draft grades. Spoiler alert, experts they ain’t.)

And this is all taken oh-so-seriously by millions of fans, some of whom paid an average of $435 to attend the “NFL Draft Experience” in Pittsburgh this year, according to Bookies.com. And that price did not include travel or lodging. All this even though the average NFL player’s career is about three years.

3. New York City’s “Big Four” Professional Sports Leagues Teams.

New York and its stooges in the sports media like to consider the city the center of the sports world and bloviate on and on about the iconic franchises and “The Garden” and blah, blah, blah. Too bad New York’s teams haven’t lived up to the hype for more than a decade. Despite having eight teams in the “Big Four” New York has had almost no participation in title games, let alone championships in the past decade plus. Their cumulative lack of championship success is mind boggling and defies the odds. Even worse, other than the Yankees, the teams collectively have been mostly irrelevant even in their regular seasons. Let us count the ways these New York City teams underwhelm:

Yankees: Despite their bloated payrolls, the Yankees last won a World Series in 2009. They did make it to the Series in 2024 but managed to win exactly one game.

Mets. With the highest payroll in baseball, they are an embarrassment this year and they last won the World Series in 1986 during Ronald Reagan’s second term.

Knicks. OK, the Knicks won a championship this year — for the first time in 53 years! Richard Nixon was still a year away from resigning the last time they won it all. Enjoy the title Knicks fans, but don’t count on that current group winning another one any time soon.

Rangers. The Rangers last won the Stanley Cup in 1994 and that snapped a 54-year dry spell. They missed the playoffs (hard to do in the NHL) the past two years and are rebuilding again.

Giants. They no longer make the playoffs either (twice in the past 10 years) and haven’t won the Super Bowl since 2012.

Islanders. The last time they won a title, Ronald Reagan was president. In his first term.

Brooklyn Nets. Never won an NBA championship. Are they still in the NBA?

Jets. Enough said.

OK, one thing about the Jets: the only time they won a championship Reagan was in office — as governor of California. And Nixon hadn’t been sworn in as president yet!

If you are not getting all the Nixon and Reagan references because of your age, that only reinforces my point. Or it’s the start of another list about the failures of our education system . . . .

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