I think what TJ is hammering at...
Is that you can do things to have the best outcome in the near future (next week to next year), or you can do them to have the best outcome in 2-5 years. Most of the time, those arn't the same things. That's short-termism vs. long-termism.
There's also small picture vs. big picture. You can do things that cause you to perform well in the immediate environment, or you can do things that will cause you to do well in areas surrounding your immediate environemnt.
The problem is that tournament paintball is currently mostly a short-term, small picture endeavor. There are 10 or so pro teams, all of which are comprised of throw-away players, who have a fan base of tournament players. Most companies seem to be trying to have the winning team to reach the customers in the fan base. If you're looking at the immediate picture and the immediate environment, this makes sense.
The problem is that they are totally ignoring the real market, because it's outside of their short term, small picture view.
The real money is in players, including the 90% rec audience, and advertising/endorsement dollars from showing paintball as a sport, hopefully to people who may not even have ever played paintball before. THAT'S why the cheating has to be stopped. Most rec players, and even a good chunk of tournament players, know that cheating is a rampant problem at the pro level, which makes it very difficult to sell paintball as a sport. People arn't going to watch it if they don't think the people on the field are actually even playing the game.
It's why college paintball has fans. We'd lose playing pro teams. We'd lose bad. But there's plenty of people who'd rather watch us play because we're not wiping and fighting.
If the people in paintball really wanted to make a ****load of money, they'd make the tough long-term, big-picture choices. They'd stop sponsoring their buddies and the pro teams, go find 100 or so ATHLETES (not even necessarily people who play paintball), make them play fair, and run a league. They'd take the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that goes into Dynasty and Avalanche and Aftershock and spend it on quality officiating, because good-enough players are inexpensive, but good officials are not.
Yeah, a lot of your pro-player friends are going to be pissed, yeah some one else's team who still gets the $200k sponsorship and allows cheaters to play will win and won't be wearing your logo...
But then everyone else might start taking you - and the sport - seriously. You might actually have non-players show up to spectate an event when they don't hate the people playing in it.
That's why you gotta stop the cheating - because if you don't, you'll never move past the small tournament-player fanbase to a spectator supported sport.
Hell, the NFL fines players $5,000 just for having their shirt untucked. $75,000 for tackling with the helmet first. Those arn't game fouls where you lose yardage, those are player choices that hurt the game that simply are not tolerated.
I can't see why it's so difficult to apply the same attitude to wiping or fighting. Because it isn't. It's just that when a player wipes or fights, but is important to his team's success, their sponsor currently picks the short-term, small-picuture solution: Ignore it, because that's how the team will win - even if the long-term, big picture, make a bunch of money solution is to get rid of all the players like that.
Know why there's no fighting in college paintball?
Because you can only get in one fight. Then you're gone forever.
Just blows my mind that paintball companies insist on spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year supporting players who are ultimately preventing this industry from attaining tens millions of dollars a year in new market and advertising/endorsement revenue.
We need a few years of very strict penalties to clean up the mess we have now. Then maybe we can relax a bit and have something more like other pro leagues - but in the meantime, no player has anything to offer the sport that is worth putting up with any of their BS.
Oh, and I know it's possible, because it's already been done. That's why we can have 14 games of X Ball with only 4 penalties. Yeah, our players don't cheat, or even play the grey area, yeah, they get spanked when they play non-college events against teams who do play grey....
But we made the decision years ago that that was the only way we could make the most of ourselves in the long term, and it's working. If you're a whining, cheating, fighting pro player, be scared, be very very scared, because we're coming for your sponsorship dollars.
- Chris
