Book excerpt: Does the future of college football need a commissioner?
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Bill Connelly
Editor’s note: On Sept. 2, ESPN writer Bill Connelly’s book “Forward Progress: The Definitive Guide to the Future of College Football” will be released. This edited excerpt looks at whether the sport needs central leadership like professional leagues.
In 1920, professional baseball was in crisis. The Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox — star outfielder “Shoeless Joe” Jackson; co-aces Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams; four other starters (first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, and outfielder Happy Felsch); and a key backup infielder (Fred McMullin) — were indicted and accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, had, along with allegations of other fixed games, shaken the sport to its core. Baseball had been governed by a National Commission consisting of three parties with extreme self-interest: National League president John Heydler, American League president Ban Johnson, and Garry Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds team that had beaten the White Sox in the World Series. Its leadership proved lacking in this moment, and its questionable independence severely damaged perceptions. Herrmann resigned from the commission in 1920, and the commissioners couldn’t agree on a new third member.
In early October 1920, days before the start of that season’s World Series between the Brooklyn Robins and Cleveland Indians, leaders of the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, New York Giants, and Pittsburgh Pirates proposed a tribunal of, in the words of the New York Times, “three of America’s biggest men, with absolute power over both major and minor leagues.” A letter sent to every major and minor baseball club said, “If baseball is to continue to exist as our national game (and it will) it must be with the recognition on the part of club owners and players that the game itself belongs to the American people, and not to either owners or players.”
The letter stated that “the present deplorable condition in baseball has been brought about by the lack of complete supervisory control of professional baseball,” that “the only cure for such condition is by having at the head of baseball men in no wise connected with baseball who are so prominent and representative among the American people that not a breath of suspicion could be ever reflected.” It concluded, “The practical operation of this agreement would be the selection of three men of such unquestionable reputation and standing in fields other than baseball that the mere knowledge of their control of baseball, in itself, would insure that the public interests would first be served, and that, therefore, as a natural sequence, all existing evils would disappear.” This tribunal would have the power to punish players, strip owners of their franchises, “establish a proper relationship between minor leagues and major leagues,” you name it.
This proposal, first discussed by Cubs shareholder A.D. Lasker, became known as the Lasker Plan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of clubs — particularly, those in the American League still loyal to the strong-willed Johnson — initially balked at the idea, to the point where the National League considered beginning an entirely new league with a few insurrectionist AL clubs, including the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. But all necessary parties eventually came to the table, and figures as grand as former president William Howard Taft, General John J. Pershing and former treasury secretary William G. McAdoo were under discussion for the tribunal.
The search pretty quickly began to revolve around a single figure: Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. A known baseball fan and an occasional showman on the bench, the 54-year-old Landis was known primarily for his antitrust judgment against Standard Oil, issuing the corporation a $29.2 million fine in 1907, equivalent to almost $1 billion today. (The U.S. Court of Appeals would eventually strike down the verdict.) He was regarded as tough but thoughtful, a grand figure but a supporter of the everyman. He would go on to serve as the sport’s first commissioner, a one-man tribunal, until his death in 1944.
Landis proved ruthless and uncompromising when he felt he needed to be. Despite all of the indicted “Black Sox” being acquitted in a criminal trial, Landis still banned them from baseball for life, stating, “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing ball games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.” For better or worse, he stuck to that decision through the years despite both legal and emotional appeals.
Landis wasn’t a ruthless traditionalist, however. The All-Star Game was created under his watch in the early 1930s and proved to be a big hit, and while he didn’t seem to approve of the development of farm systems, in which minor league clubs developed affiliations with major league clubs to develop and promote their talent through the ranks, he also didn’t stop it, choosing only to step in on a case-by-case basis. He was far from infallible — you can certainly find inconsistency in some of his decisions, and Lord knows baseball didn’t exactly speed toward integration under his watch. (Jackie Robinson’s major league debut came two and a half years after Landis’ death. He might not have stopped that from happening had he still been in charge, but he certainly wasn’t pushing owners to become more progressive in this regard.) But he provided as steady a hand as possible, and both the trust in and popularity of baseball grew under his watch.
Absolute power? A dictatorial hand over the sport you’ve loved since childhood? Man, sign me up. That sounds amazing. Sure, I’ve never issued a billion-dollar fine to anyone, and my strongest bona fides regarding my general incorruptibility probably stem from the time I went on “The Paul Finebaum Show” and proclaimed that Cincinnati should have ranked higher than the SEC’s Texas A&M in the 2020 College Football Playoff rankings. But that qualifies as speaking truth to power, right?
In 2017, while at SB Nation, I indeed decided to run for college football commissioner. Granted, there was no such election and no such position, but it felt like a good use of time all the same. “College football needs someone to make long-term decisions,” I wrote. “College football needs someone who can reflect the interest of programs at every level: Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, North Alabama, and all.”
There was an explosion of commish talk in 2016, thanks to a number of issues like College Football Playoff selections, conference schedules (mainly that some conferences play eight conference games and others play nine), and high school satellite camps, an issue that was all the rage for a few months and then vanished from consciousness altogether, to the point where I don’t even feel the need to define it here. “There needs to be somebody that looks out for what’s best for the game,” Alabama‘s Nick Saban said at the time, “not what’s best for the Big Ten or what’s best for the SEC or what’s best for Jim Harbaugh, but what’s best for the game of college football — the integrity of the game, the coaches, the players, and the people that play it. That’s bigger than all of this.” (Harbaugh was at the center of the satellite camp issue that I’m still not going to explain further.) But even with Saban’s high-visibility comments, nothing came of it. Nothing ever comes of it.
Through the decades the only thing everyone has seemingly agreed on in this sport is the need for a commissioner figure.
“Charley Trippi, one of the all-time greats in college and professional football … said college football today needs a national commissioner to direct the game on a national basis. Trippi … charged that the National Collegiate Athletic Association is ‘controlled by the Big Ten.’ He said he felt no conference in the nation should have any kind of monopoly in the game.” — Macon News, 1958
“You don’t think we need a commissioner and a set of rules to make things even? We’re the only sport in America that doesn’t have the same set of rules for everybody that plays … Everybody goes to their own neighborhood and makes their own little rules.” — Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher, 2016
“I think there’s a perception with the public that perhaps college football doesn’t have its act together because there are so many different entities pulling in different directions.” — former Baylor head coach Grant Teaff, 1994
“… If you’re biased by a specific conference or if you’re impacted by making all your decisions based on revenue and earnings, then we’re never going to get to a good place.” — Penn State head coach James Franklin, 2024
“What this business needs is a commissioner who has the best interest of the game in mind. There needs to be somebody who creates a structure in which people just don’t cannibalize each other. … The NCAA president doesn’t have any legal authority to do much, in his defense, because they’ve given away that authority over the course of the last 60 years.” — West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck, 2011
“I think we need to have a … commissioner. I think football should be separate from the other sports. Just because our school is leaving to go to the Big Ten in football … our softball team should be playing Arizona in softball. Our basketball team should be playing Arizona in basketball. … And they’ll say, well, how do you do that? Well, Notre Dame’s independent in football, and they’re in a conference in everything else. I think we should all be independent in football. You can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Power 5, and you can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Group of 5, and we separate, and we play each other. You can have the West Coast teams, and every year we play seven games against the West Coast teams and then we play the East — we play Syracuse, Boston College, Pitt, West Virginia, Virginia — and then the next year you play against the South while you still play your seven teams. You play a seven-game schedule, you play four against another conference opponent, division opponent, and you can always play against one Mountain West team every year so we can still keep those rivalries going. … But I think if you went together collectively, as a group, and said there’s 132 teams and we all share the same TV contract, so that the Mountain West doesn’t have one and the Sun Belt doesn’t have another and the SEC another, that we all go together, that’s a lot of games, and there’s a lot of people in the TV world that would go through it. … But I think if we still do the same and take all that money … that money now needs to be shared with the student-athletes, and there needs to be revenue sharing, and the players should get paid, and you get rid of [NIL], and the schools should be paying the players because the players are what the product is. And the fact that they don’t get paid is really the biggest travesty. Not that I’ve thought about it.” — UCLA head coach Chip Kelly, 2023
Kelly’s spiel, spoken at a pace faster than his fastest old Oregon offense at a press conference before UCLA’s LA Bowl appearance, made waves. In a way, he was basically calling for a College Football Association of sorts, an all-of-FBS league that could negotiate a huge television contract to be divvied out in a fair manner. In a perfect world, maybe that’s what would exist. But as with any other “In a perfect world …” construct, the real world prevailed instead.
The waves continued after Kelly’s comments. In January 2024, Nick Saban retired in part because he was frustrated with all the different demands of the NIL era. In February, Saban told ESPN’s Chris Low, “If my voice can bring about some meaningful change, I want to help any way I can, because I love the players, and I love college football. What we have now is not college football — not college football as we know it. You hear somebody use the word ‘student-athlete.’ That doesn’t exist.” A company man until the end, Saban suggested that either SEC commissioner Greg Sankey or Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne might make a good commissioner for the sport. (“They would be more qualified than I am. They’re in it every day and know all the issues.”) In December 2024, Penn State head coach James Franklin expressed frustration with the state of the college football calendar and the fact that his backup quarterback, Beau Pribula, felt he needed to hop into the transfer portal before the Nittany Lions’ College Football Playoff journey began to make sure he had a solid home for the winter semester. His solution? “Let’s get a commissioner of college football that is waking up every single morning and going to bed every single night making decisions that’s in the best interest of college football. I think Nick Saban would be the obvious choice if we made that decision.”
Did anything come of that? Of course not. But that just means I’m still a candidate, right?
Back in 2017, my campaign platform consisted of nine pillars intended to maximize both the athlete’s experience and the fan’s enjoyment of the sport:
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A student-athlete bill of rights to ensure proper health care options, guaranteed undergraduate scholarships, and freer transfer rules.
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A modernized definition of amateurism that allowed players to profit off of their name, image, and likeness.
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The return of the EA Sports video game. (Hey, you have to throw some red meat to the base, right?)
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A fairer recruiting landscape that allowed players easier releases from their letters of intent if a coach left and explored changes to signing periods and regulations surrounding official visits and other recruiting rules.
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A system of promotion and relegation that incorporates actual merit into the sport’s power structure. (This one’s always on my mind.)
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An expanded playoff.
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Ditching unequal conference divisions in favor of a system of permanent rivalries and a larger rotation of opponents.
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Increasing creativity and flexibility in nonconference scheduling. (One idea: a “BracketBuster Saturday” in November in which everyone in FBS gets paired off based on in-season results.)
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Changes in clock rules that stemmed the recent increases in average game times, which had reached nearly three and a half hours per game.
It’s been about eight years since I put that list together, and damned if I haven’t gotten a lot of what I wanted: We’ve seen either partial or complete success for items No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 9. That’s a hell of a success rate, especially considering how hard it is to actually institute change in this sport at times. But it feels like a lot of the forces I was responding to at the time — mainly, massive disorganization within the sport and an ever-increasing imbalance between haves and have-nots — have only gotten worse since 2017. Why? BECAUSE WE STILL HAVE NO COMMISSIONER! Any change that could have produced progressive outcomes only made the imbalance worse because when no one’s in charge, that really means that the most powerful and self-interested figures in the sport are in charge. And their only goal is to reinforce the power structure.
“I can’t tell you how many times I heard [former Big Ten commissioner] Jim Delany say two things,” former Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said. “One: ‘You didn’t bring the Rose Bowl, or the Orange Bowl, or the Sugar Bowl, or the Fiesta Bowl, so [you get] whatever we decide you are worthy of.’ He also used to say, ‘The world cares more about 6-6 Michigan than 12-0 Utah, and until you realize and understand that and accept that …’ and I got it. But we always seemed to find a way to work together for the good of the cause, the good of the overall enterprise. Great, you started the Rose Bowl, but was it all bad that TCU beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl [in 2011]? That Utah beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl [in 2009]? Did the enterprise come crumbling down? No. We’re trying to look at the good of the cause and what’s best for the second most popular sport out there, and what I always had in the back of my mind trying to protect was how we could make sure that people give a damn about college football.”
For somewhere between 10 and 30 years, Delany was the sport’s most powerful figure. He kick-started multiple runs of conference realignment, and the Big Ten’s creation of the Big Ten Network turned out to be a game-changer. But college football’s most powerful figure was also doing everything he could to keep other conferences’ ambitions in check, to almost limit the sport’s potential growth in other areas of the country.
“When people talk about wanting a commissioner, what they’re really asking for is someone whose job it is to look out for the betterment of the sport as a whole,” said NBC Sports’ Nicole Auerbach. “I know it sounds really pollyannaish and idealistic, but you don’t have someone whose job it is to look out for the greater good. So you have competing interests. You have an NCAA president who has certain motivations and goals — and major college football is not even under their purview. And then you have all these different commissioners, and it makes a lot of sense that we ended up in a position where conferences started hiring outside of college sports. They hired businesspeople, they hired media executives, and then those people believe that their goal is to advance the interest only of their conference because that’s how those jobs work.”
“Lately, it seems like we’ve morphed into, ‘I’ve gotta feed the beast,'” said Thompson. “‘I’ve got 18 schools, 16 schools …’ In 2023, there were five autonomous conferences with an average membership of 13 schools each. Now we’ve got four autonomous conferences with an average membership of 17. We’ve gone to that consolidation, and a commissioner is paid to protect his 14, 16, 18 school interests. But, man, it just doesn’t seem like we care as much about how we just keep this thing going, how we keep 80,000 people, 50,000 people, hell, even 30,000 people coming to games.”
Now, professional sports have proven rather definitively that you can be disorganized and inequality-friendly with a commissioner atop the organizational chart. Just look at the last 35 years for most of Europe’s biggest soccer leagues or large swaths of Major League Baseball’s history — baseball had all the inequality a fan of capitalism could possibly crave, especially in the 1990s. And, hey, having an occasional tyrant like David Stern in charge didn’t stop the NBA from basically being ruled by three teams for decades — from 1980 to 2002, the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, and Chicago Bulls won 17 of 23 titles. Even in the NFL, all the parity measures in the world couldn’t stop the teams that employed either Tom Brady (New England, then Tampa Bay) or Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City) from winning 10 of 24 Super Bowls from 2001 to 2024.
It’s also not hard to see how a dictatorial figure like the Landis-style commissioner I dream of becoming could get corrupted. (I wouldn’t, of course — you can trust me — but others might.)
You can obviously manage things quite poorly with a commissioner in charge. But the only thing worse might be not having one. Professional organizations have commissioners, and at its highest level college football is now a professional organization of sorts. But a quote from Notre Dame president Father John J. Cavanaugh from the late 1940s still rings impressively true: “The type of reformers I refer to are those who play with the question for public consumption, who seem to say that an indefinable something has to be done in a way nobody knows how, at a time nobody knows when, in places nobody knows where, to accomplish nobody knows what. I wonder if there are not grounds to suspect that the reformers … protest too much, that their zeal may be an excuse for their own negligence in reforming themselves.”
Of course, there’s no place for a commissioner in college football’s structure. There’s no National College Football Office for him or her to occupy. England has spent the last few years working toward an “independent football regulator” (IFR) to oversee soccer as a whole in the country — in a lot of the same ways we’re talking about here — and it might create an intriguing model to follow. Or it might prove to totally lack independence from either partisan government or financial influence. We’ll see.
The creation of the College Football Playoff as an entity might have produced an opportunity for a leadership structure of sorts — imagine a situation in which schools must opt in to CFP membership (which features a set of rules and protocols you must follow) to compete for the CFP title — but it doesn’t appear we’re anywhere close to that at the moment. Among other things, expanding the CFP’s governance potential would again require a vote from Sankey and Petitti to strip themselves of power. “It could come through the CFP,” Auerbach said. “They already have a governance structure. In theory, they could build that out and add all of the bureaucratic pieces they would need to truly govern the sport. But you would need the people who are powerful now to be willing to give up some of that power for the collective good of the sport — you would need to have a willingness from the SEC and Big Ten commissioners, or those schools in their leagues, to give up power to have a collective, centralized, powerful figure. … It’s just hard to imagine that that would happen.”
“I think any governance system probably has to shift power away from the presidents,” said Extra Points’ Matt Brown, “… That could be a centralized commissioner. That could be a different board.” Right now, however, it’s nothing. And without anyone atop the pyramid, any change that could be good for the sport just exacerbates the haves-versus-have-nots divide that already exists.
Writing about the possibility of interleague play in Major League Baseball in the early 1970s, Roger Angell wrote, “The plan is startling and perhaps imperfect, but it is surely worth hopeful scrutiny at the top levels of baseball. I am convinced, however, that traditionalists need have no fear that it will be adopted. Any amalgamation would require all the owners to subdue their differences, to delegate real authority, to accept change, and to admit that they share an equal responsibility for everything that happens to their game. And that, to judge by their past record and by their performance in the strike, is exactly what they will never do.” He was right and wrong: it did come into existence, but it took 25 years to do so. We’ve been talking about a college football commissioner for far longer than that, and there doesn’t yet appear to be much of an appetite for subduing differences or delegating real authority. And it’s hard to imagine that changing without some sort of Black Sox-level emergency.
Then again, we can only envision what we know to envision. “Our imagination is bound by our experiences,” The Athletic’s Ralph Russo said. “And that’s making it hard to see where all this could possibly go. I feel like there’s a conclusion here that nothing in our collective experience could have brought us to. There’s just something, some other event, that is going to influence college football, probably an outside event. I say that because the history of college football is riddled with outside events totally influencing the power structure. It’s demographic movement — where the population goes within the United States. It’s wars. It’s segregation and desegregation. All of these things. So is the next thing something that completely disrupts the university system? Is it something that disrupts the U.S. government?”
At best, a commissioner figure could for the first time give the sport a vision to follow and a steadying hand for guidance. At worst, he or she would reinforce the divides and inequality that have already been established, furrowing his or her brow and talking about how great and deep college football is and how hard it is to satisfy everyone before simply giving the SEC and Big Ten whatever they want.
Regardless, I’m keeping my hat in the ring. CONNELLY 2025 (or 2036, or 2048, whatever it ends up being).
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Ryan S. Clark
Face it. You’ve thought about this at home or at work. You’ve done it when you’re with family and friends. You’ve even thought about it before bed and when you should be watching your favorite team.
Who is going to make the national team for [insert nation] at the Olympics?
Every national team is facing tough personnel decisions. Some more than others. But it all comes with the caveat that so much can change until it’s time to submit their final rosters at the end of December.
Until then, here’s a projection examining what the teams for Canada, Czechia, Finland, Sweden and the United States might look like ahead of the Winter Olympics men’s hockey tournament that begins Feb. 11 in Milan-Cortina.
Jump to a roster:
United States
Canada
Sweden
Finland
Czechia
United States
Note: Players in bold were the first six selected.
Names to watch: G Joey Daccord, F Alex DeBrincat, G Thatcher Demko, D Lane Hutson, F Patrick Kane, F Chris Kreider, F Frank Nazar, F Shane Pinto, F Jason Robertson, F Vincent Trocheck, F Trevor Zegras
From the point: Finding options isn’t going to be a problem for Team USA. Within this projected roster, the Americans can field a lineup that possesses balance and versatility in many areas.
Yet it appears that the two players who could impact Team USA’s roster selection process might be Patrick Kane and Vincent Trocheck. Kane is currently injured and has been out of the lineup since mid-October. Before the injury, he had five points in as many games, which allowed him to present an early case for making the roster in what’s a crowded field at winger.
Trocheck was injured in the second game of the season and began practicing with the New York Rangers on Monday. A fully healthy Trocheck would give Team USA another two-way center who can be trusted to play in numerous situations — as well as one more selection discussion for what makes the most sense down the middle.
How does Thatcher Demko factor into the goaltending discussion?
The U.S. is believed to have the strongest set of goalies of any team eligible for the Olympics. But should its group of three include Demko?
The Vancouver Canucks goaltender was a Vezina Trophy finalist in the 2023-24 season before an injury-riddled 2024-25 season saw him struggle to attain consistency. As of Tuesday, Demko’s save percentage (.911) and goals-against average (2.57) were significantly better than Jeremy Swayman‘s marks (.896, 3.14). He is also fourth in goals saved above average, according to Natural Stat Trick.
Canada
Note: Players in bold were the first six selected.
Names to watch: F Connor Bedard, F Sam Bennett, G Mackenzie Blackwood, D Evan Bouchard, F Anthony Cirelli, D Noah Dobson, F Bo Horvat, F Zach Hyman, D Mike Matheson, F John Tavares
From the point: A wealth of options is Canada’s greatest strength while simultaneously being its biggest challenge. With this particular projection, there is a two-way element with many of the forwards, while the defensive setup has puck movers partnered with stay-at-home options who have size. There are remaining questions:
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What happens if Zach Hyman returns from his wrist injury and provides consistent production?
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How does Canada’s goalie situation change if Mackenzie Blackwood, who has also been injured to start the season, can find consistency?
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Can any of the players who missed the cut in this projection get back on the radar with a strong next month?
Could Canada take Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini?
Speed — and those who know how to use that speed in tight spaces — played a big role in Canada’s success at the 4 Nations Face-Off. Although Canada has numerous players like that in this projection, is it possible it could add more by bringing in Bedard and moving Celebrini into the active lineup?
Both provide another offensive dimension, and Celebrini has shown he can handle the demands of being a two-way center. Either way, expect both to be heavily in the mix in 2030.
Sweden
Note: Players in bold were the first six selected.
Names to watch: F Mikael Backlund, F Andre Burakovsky, D Philip Broberg, D Simon Edvinsson, G Samuel Ersson, D Oliver Ekman-Larsson, D Adam Larsson, F Victor Olofsson
From the point: Sweden appears to have balance throughout its lineup in this projection, although there could still be certain adjustments. Namely, what makes the most sense for Sweden at left wing?
Lucas Raymond and Jesper Bratt have had starts that justify them being on the top two lines; it’s at the bottom two lines where the questions begin. Gabriel Landeskog has three points through his first 13 games though his average ice time is seventh among forwards on the Colorado Avalanche. Before Rickard Rakell broke his hand, he had eight points in nine games; he’ll return sometime in December. And of course, there’s the discussion about whether Sweden should use Elias Pettersson down the middle or on the wing.
Sweden also could be facing questions related to Linus Ullmark‘s struggles to start the season, and if the team could be inclined to take a look at Edvinsson after his start.
Are Simon Edvinsson and Victor Olofsson becoming too hard to ignore?
Playing for two of the top teams in the NHL entering November usually attracts attention, which is the case for Edvinsson and Olofsson.
Edvinsson has continued to carve out his place as one of the Red Wings’ most important players. He has played a top-pairing role, is second on the team in average ice time and 5-on-5 minutes, and is fourth in short-handed minutes.
Olofsson is operating in a top-nine role for the Avs and has used that opportunity to be fifth on the team in points. He’s on pace for a career-high 63 points this season.
Finland
Note: Players in bold were the first six selected.
Names to watch: F Kasperi Kapanen, G Joonas Korpisalo, F Patrik Laine, F Jani Nyman, F Juuso Parssinen, C Aatu Raty, F Eeli Tolvanen, D Juuso Valimaki
From the point: Finland’s potential roster has been — and will likely continue to be — impacted by major injuries this season.
Aleksander Barkov, who was one of Finland’s “first six,” tore an ACL and MCL in training camp, and was the first domino to fall. Finland has seen other players — such as Kaapo Kakko, Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen and Rasmus Ristolainen — miss the start of the regular season while recovering from injuries. Kakko played his first game Nov. 1, Luukkonen made his debut Oct. 25, and Ristolainen is expected to be out until December with a triceps injury.
Patrik Laine sustained a core muscle injury in late October, which could see him miss at least three months — and potentially place his Olympic chances in jeopardy.
What does Finland’s plan look like should more injuries arise?
It’s possible that Finland could find some relief should Laine be cleared to play at the Olympics. But in the event he’s not, Finland could be tempted to turn to some of its younger players in the NHL such as Nyman, Parssinen and Raty at forward. All three entered Nov. 3 with either the same or slightly more points than Jesperi Kotkaniemi in a similar number of games. There’s also the possibility that Finland could opt for more experienced forwards such as Kasperi Kapanen or Eeli Tolvanen.
Another option for Finland’s defense is Valimaki. He was named to Finland’s 4 Nations Face-Off roster but didn’t play. He tore an ACL in March and is expected to return sometime around November or December. He could be an option, given there have been only seven Finnish defensemen who have played in the NHL this season entering November.
Czechia
Note: Players in bold were the first six selected.
Names to watch: F Filip Chlapik, F Jakub Lauko, F Adam Klapka, D Jan Kostalek, F Tomas Nosek, F Michael Spacek, F Matej Stransky, F Simon Stransky, G Karel Vejmelka, F Adam Zboril
From the point: Tomas Hertl, Martin Necas, David Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha have had the sort of starts to the season that strengthen the notion Czechia’s top-six forward corps could make a significant impact at the Games.
Now it’s a matter of determining what Czechia could receive from its supporting cast — with a number of them playing outside of the NHL.
In the most recent men’s IIHF World Championship, Roman Cevenka and Lukas Sedlak finished second and third on the team in points. They’ve continued to produce in the Czech Extraliga, the nation’s top professional league. Jakub Flek has opened the season with 15 goals and 22 points through 21 games.
Which two goalies will join Lukas Dostal on the Czechia roster?
There was a time when Czechia seemed poised to take Dostal, Vejmelka and Dan Vladar as its three goalies. But that appears to have changed — or at least merited a conversation.
The expectation is that Dostal, who was among the first six players named to Czechia’s provisional roster, will be the starter. As for the rest of the field? Jakub Dobes has won his first six games, while his GSAA ranks third in the NHL, per Natural Stat Trick. Vladar entered Tuesday ranked third in goals-against average (2.11) and save percentage (.924) while being 14th in GSAA.
Although Vejmelka has the same number of wins (six) as Dobes, he was 25th in goals-against average, 34th in save percentage and 55th in GSAA.
Sports
How the high-contact, high-octane Blue Jays nearly took down a baseball superpower — and how it could change MLB
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Bradford Doolittle
FOR THE FIRST time in 32 years, the Toronto Blue Jays won the American League pennant.
They also came up just short of snapping their World Series title drought, dropping a memorable, tense, 11-inning Game 7 to the Los Angeles Dodgers at a rollicking Rogers Centre on Saturday.
To push the defending champs as far as they could be pushed, Toronto leaned on a diverse, balanced offense that ranked among MLB’s best all season (fourth in runs per game) and somehow got better in the playoffs despite the unforgiving crucible created by October-style pitching staffs.
All of this from a team that just a year ago finished last in the AL East and ranked 23rd in scoring. All this from a team that, after some disappointing free agent pursuits over the past couple of years, entered the playoffs with largely the same roster as last year.
This year, at least, splashy overhauls were overrated.
“The players that are here, they have continued to get better,” Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said at the Series’ outset.
As the powder-blue dust settles from a magical run that saw the Blue Jays turn an entire nation on its proverbial ear, questions are turning to whether their accomplishment can be replicated. Some of it is standard: whether the latest “it” team can sustain its sudden rise. In a larger sense, though, the baseball industry is wondering what this Toronto run means.
Featuring an offense whose standout trait was an MLB-best batting average, the Blue Jays weren’t just a successful team that adapted to every challenge along the way. The Blue Jays were fun, an absolute gas to watch — for the simple reason that they put the ball in play.
They were led by one of the most fun players in baseball, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who spent the past month terrorizing opposing pitchers. He did it with an elite combination of contact and pop, something that his teammates emulated as best they could. In becoming more like Vladdy, the Toronto offense turned into a juggernaut. And, now, the Blue Jays have the offense everyone else wants to have.
They leveraged Guerrero’s presence to give them the identity they sought, and they acquired and molded players to work in that approach.
“We have always felt that contact would turn into more damage,” Atkins said. “This year, it did.”
Identity. Aesthetics. Success. And now, a pennant. The Toronto Blue Jays nearly won it all, and as we watched Canada fall in love with them, we have to ask: Have the Blue Jays solved the strikeout era?
REALLY, THE EMPHASIS on batting average in this case is more an avatar about Toronto’s style of play than about the ancient baseball statistic. Still, the Blue Jays led the majors in the category, and that was no accident. In fact, before Game 6, Blue Jays manager John Schneider mentioned it after he was asked about comments by Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell, who said the Toronto hitters had gotten lucky on what Snell felt were some pretty good pitches when they beat the lefty in Game 5.
“No, I thought we took good swings early on his fastball,” Schneider said. “And I think we led the league in batting average this year.”
The Blue Jays have constructed a lineup that balances the objective of making consistent contact — even in today’s hyper-strikeout context — remarkably, without losing the ability to hit the ball out of the park and for extra bases.
The Blue Jays aren’t all batting average, and it’s not all about simply making contact. Toronto rated better than the MLB average in home run percentage and isolated power. The Blue Jays were also third in line-drive rate, which helps fuel the average.
During the regular season, the Blue Jays ranked 23rd in the majors in scoring 38.3% of their runs on home runs. That number rose to 48% in the playoffs, but the strikeout rate remained low.
The Blue Jays led the majors with the lowest strikeout rate (17.8%) of any team over the past eight seasons — and lowered that number to 17.1% in the postseason, the lowest by a playoff team that played at least three games since the 2014 San Francisco Giants.
The increase in home run percentage in the playoffs paired with the stunning improvement in strikeout rate unsurprisingly led to more scoring. Toronto scored 4.93 runs per game during the season, ranking fourth, but rolled up an average of 5.83 runs during its 18 postseason games, nearly 30% more than any other team.
Not just contact. Not just power. Toronto puts the ball in play, but its approach always had to be more than that if it was going to translate to the high-stakes games.
“We tried to thread the needle a little bit with that going from last year to this year,” Schneider said. “Understanding that our main guys make a lot of contact, we leaned into it a little bit. And I think, at the same time, you don’t want to just be playing pingpong.”
The Blue Jays finished third in OPS during the regular season behind the New York Yankees and Dodgers, but with better batting averages and on-base percentages than both. With runners in scoring position, Toronto led the majors in average (.292) and BABIP (.329). Only the Kansas City Royals struck out less after counts that reached two strikes. Over and over, the Blue Jays showed an ability to adjust and adapt to what was needed and what was thrown.
The Blue Jays aren’t the first successful playoff team to focus on contact — most of the excellent Houston Astros offenses during their run of success over the past decade featured a relatively balanced attack. The champion 2018 Boston Red Sox were another team like that.
But the Blue Jays might be the most impressive version that we’ve seen yet, if only because the difficulties of hitting for average keep increasing with each passing year as more and more strikeout pitchers arrive in the majors.
It’s worth considering the team the Dodgers vanquished one round before Toronto, the Milwaukee Brewers, who ranked third in regular-season batting average (.258) and posted the fourth-lowest strikeout rate (20.3%). But whereas the Blue Jays gave Los Angeles’ red-hot pitching staff far more trouble than any of the Dodgers’ National League playoff opponents, the Brewers’ hitters were more or less helpless during L.A.’s sweep of the National League Championship Series.
Maybe Milwaukee just ran into the Dodgers’ pitching buzzsaw just as many of its hitters were struggling. Still, it is worth noting that although Milwaukee and Toronto both paired elite averages with elite contact rates, they were in fact very different offenses, one that worked in the playoffs and one that did not.
For one, the Blue Jays were the more veteran team, with an average hitter age more than one season older than the Brewers’. The bigger difference was that the Blue Jays didn’t run all that much, so it was their collective extra-base ability that augmented their high-contact approach, whereas the Brewers went wild on the basepaths. Finally, the Brewers walked more — the Blue Jays weren’t a wild-swinging team but were only about league average in walk percentage.
Even though Milwaukee walked just as often during the playoffs, its lack of collective pop continued and its strikeout rate spiked, leading to a cratering in average and on-base percentage. With no one getting on base, the Brewers weren’t able to get their running game going, especially against the Dodgers.
The level of pitching that playoff teams have to navigate is brutal. Teams have condensed their staffs to their nastiest hurlers. The built-in travel days give the best of those hurlers more game-free rest days. Over the past decade, during baseball’s era of strikeout hyperinflation, teams have struck out 22.4% of the time during the regular season. At playoff time, that number jumps to 24.8%, even though the best offenses are generally still playing.
The Blue Jays turned that around. When a team can navigate the postseason with an offense that somehow gets better during the playoffs, the industry will notice.
IT’S ESPECIALLY NOTABLE because the majority of the position players who appeared during the World Series were with the club last season, and in many cases, have been with the organization for years.
That wasn’t entirely intentional. The Blue Jays wanted to sign Juan Soto, but didn’t. They wanted to sign Shohei Ohtani, but didn’t. Instead, the front office crafted a revamped offensive philosophy under the guidance of a hitting staff led by coach David Popkins, who was hired just more than a year ago.
Popkins, who came to Toronto last October after parting ways with the Minnesota Twins, talked to MLB.com about his philosophy before the season.
“My philosophy is built off of creativity,” Popkins said. “We’re trying to become the most creative lineup at scoring runs in baseball. We do that by practicing all of the different situations and clubs that we’re going to need in the game.”
By “clubs,” Popkins doesn’t mean teams or opponents, but golf clubs. Popkins was talking about an initiative in which, just as in golf, you pick a specific iron or wood or wedge based on the terrain and the distance to the hole, and he would craft a baseball lineup that was adaptable to the game situation and the pitcher on the mound.
This meant that, at the very least, the Blue Jays, under Popkins, were not going with the kind of all-or-nothing approach that has become too prevalent in 2020s baseball. Get a pitch and launch it. It’s an easy philosophy to describe but incredibly complex to implement.
“We say all the time, ‘What club do you take out of your bag?'” Schneider said. “I think last year, we had a lot of guys just hanging out with like a 7-iron the entire time. So, it’s when to use that, when to use a driver. And knowing that they can make contact is kind of a little safety net for them.”
Schneider and his players tout the work of Popkins and his staff. When they were hired last fall, the hitting coaches had no way to know that they were working with a championship-caliber offense because the lineup was not on that level last season.
“[Popkins] gets praise, but he probably doesn’t get enough,” Bo Bichette said. “The energy he brings every day is second to none. I’ve never experienced that from a coach, the passion. When you have that type of passion, you tend to really learn about your craft and learn what it takes. He’s helped all of us for sure.
“We have a ton of talent who — myself in particular — didn’t perform to our capabilities last year. So, that plays a part. But I think we train to be able to do anything in the batter’s box.”
Certainly, there is position regression in these numbers — players bouncing back after down seasons — but consider the following list of leaps in batting average:
Addison Barger, .197 to .243
Bichette, .225 to .311
Ernie Clement, .263 to .277
Alejandro Kirk, .253 to .282
Davis Schneider, .191 to .234
Daulton Varsho .214 to .238
Bichette, who became a free agent after the World Series, might be the litmus test for how eager teams are to follow in Toronto’s footsteps. He’s a career .294 hitter but doesn’t run well, even when healthy, and his declining defensive metrics suggest a need to move down the defensive spectrum. But at the plate, he pairs contact with consistent extra-base ability. If you want a Blue Jays offense, why not sign one of the players most responsible for making it work?
And then there’s 36-year-old George Springer, whose jump from .220 to .309 was the largest year-over-year improvement in batting average among any qualifying hitter this season. Overall, Toronto’s team average went from .241 to .265, even though Anthony Santander (.175) and Andres Gimenez (.210) struggled.
Much has been made about one aspect of the Blue Jays’ improved contact ability and success, and converting that contact into hits. That’s bat speed, which is now tracked by Statcast and can be monitored by teams and fans.
The Blue Jays weren’t elite in average bat speed, but a number of their key hitters showed marked increases over last year — Guerrero, Clement and Barger, just to name a few. Springer was up by nearly 2 mph in his age-35 season.
Yet, all of these players controlled those faster bats, got wood on the ball and did so with authority. The formula seems blindingly obvious. If the pitchers are throwing harder, then the hitters need to swing faster. It’s not remotely that simple in reality, but this is, in effect, what the Blue Jays did.
“I think the whole industry kind of started looking at that last year with more public knowledge of it, public information of it,” Schneider said. “When guys were throwing as hard as they are, you got to combat it somehow, whether it’s with bat speed or mechanics.”
THE BLUE JAYS’ modernized approach to an old-school offense succeeded at a time when many major league teams have put more emphasis on identifying, scouting and developing contact hitting. Toronto is arguably the first team of this era to break through at this level with such an approach.
Because this has already been a trend around baseball, Toronto’s success might be less of a light bulb flashing in the minds of rival executives and more of a validation for what other teams have been trying to do.
“In terms of how baseball goes forward, to me, pitching is so good these days with the stuff and the velo, you have to be able to put the ball in play,” Schneider said. “You have to put pressure on the defense and the pitcher. I like that we can do it in a variety of ways.”
For MLB — the entity — it’s a revelation because the approach didn’t just work, it also was so much fun to watch. And, most importantly, it paid off with a pennant and a thrilling World Series performance that will be long remembered. If you needed any more evidence for that than what existed before this Fall Classic, you just had to feel the Rogers Centre vibrating on the banks of Lake Ontario as the World Series reached its historic crescendo.
They didn’t win it all, but the season was a triumph for the Blue Jays, a triumph for Toronto and a triumph for all of Canada. And if more teams can be like the Blue Jays going forward, it’ll be a triumph for baseball fans, too.
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