How a company can be genius and royally terrible at the same time.

FloSports's plan is genius... if they were a pharmaceutical company. Flo reminds me of that San Francisco pharma startup that thinks they've found the cure to cancer, then decides to put together a fancy investor pitch with nothing more than sweet jargon. What happens next? They raise a ridiculous amount of capital but come to find out that the "magical cancer cure" was nothing more than another fancy placebo pill. It gets worse, though, then they have no other choice but to tell any people with internal employees not to say anything, or else the whole world will know of the awful fraud. It leaves them with just one choice with any defectors, the dreaded slip of paper that asks your ass to show up in court...

 

I haven't gone to business school, but the No.1 rule is they under promise and over deliver, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. This pay structure is always impossibly difficult to pull off. This has been proven in various other sectors. Remember the good old days, and that annoying yet addicting game Candy Crush with glowing red jelly beans and annoying music that somehow at its height was raking in over $4 million a day in 2018. The pay-to-play structure seldom works, consumers just aren't willing to pay for a stand-alone product that glitches out half the time. I've been saying it since day one, it's already more difficult to make money under USA Wrestling's structure, and quite honestly with all the restrictions that come into play when we talk about how the national governing body functions, it becomes really difficult to see a scenario where wresting grows from a fanbase level with USA Wrestling at the forefront.

 

This leads perfectly into what's next. I have to give credit to Flo though, the concept of a UFC-style card is absolutely genius, we just have to start outsourcing the media coverage somewhere else at least partially. This is how it works in every other sport big and small. I can never figure out for the life of me, why we can't follow the same structure of FLOBowling. All the qualifying events of the PBA Tour as well as many of the smaller events are broadcast on FLO for a premium price, and the finals of TV events are broadcast live on either FS1 or some rare occasions even on FOX. This TV deal alone has led to 20-30 tournaments a year with the top prize being a minimum of $15k each tournament weekly, and the introduction of a new concept the PBA Playoffs, in which the grand prize is a whopping one hundred thousand dollars. There is a place for FLO and their snobbish pay-to-play structure(or in this case pay to watch), but until drastic changes are made in the way that media interacts with wrestling, only the highest of highest echelons in this sport will be able to survive.  

 

I was listening to everyone's favorite Chris Pyle(Pretty sure I got the name spot on) ramble on about literally nothing for 20 minutes, when he said that a prominent name in the sport made the argument that, in the upcoming 8-man bracket, they should only feature current wrestlers, and one of Pyle's arguments for why former wrestlers should be allowed to compete is because if there were 20k tournaments, maybe they wouldn't have retired. Well, maybe they wouldn't have, Christian. Geez, what a genius observation, well let's give some thought as to why it hasn't happened till now. If there's one thing that we've learned throughout professional sports for the past 60 years ever since the television was invented, it's that the main source of revenue for any sport is the media coverage for the past 3+ years? I've got news for you, wrestlers have families just like you do. They can't wait 1368 days for a $20,000 check that only shows up if they win. Why were USA Wrestling payments to these athletes so low? Why was there no prize fund for this year's senior nationals? Have you ever bothered to ask yourself these questions? Well, the answer is right there, its because the media coverage of this sport is so royally awful, and if you wanna boast that you are the sole media outlet and run around stalking people's private Facebook forums, that's fine, but you better be ready to take the heat when it all comes crashing to the ground. To quote the legend, Tom Petty. "What goes up, must come down."

 

I've told this story before, 1993, Darts was in crisis. The same crisis that wrestling is in now. There was barely any prize money. There was abhorrent media coverage. There were no sponsors. What could have gone wrong went wrong. The corrupt British Darts Organization that recently went bankrupt, destroyed the sport. Phil Taylor won £140,000 throughout his time in the BDO. In 1993, the top 16 dart players in the world, including Phil Taylor, defected from the BDO and created the new World Darts Council. They had no business experience, no idea how the entertainment industry functions, all they knew how to do was throw a dart at a board well. The BDO instantly banned all 16 players from participating in the BDO events, and took the WDC to court; there was no turning back. The WDC nearly went bankrupt three times, the BDO tried to bribe many of the players back with moderate success. Through all of it, the players knew that one wrong step would cause them all to go back to their office jobs. The important part was they didn't care. They were fearless. They were mavericks. Phil Taylor went on to win 14 more world championships, and win over £7.5 MILLION in prize money until his retirement in 2018. A documentary of the 16 players was made in 2018 documenting their struggles appropriately titled "The Darts Mavericks"(Link below). A maverick is defined as "an unorthodox or independent-minded person". Coaches always preach being fearless on the mat. There are plenty of fearless warriors, mavericks, and leaders on the mat, the only question is if there are any mavericks off the mat to support the ones on the mat for many generations to come. Who will be the wrestling maverick(s)?