We Excuse This Disruption To Bring You LIV Golf, The XFL And Banana Ball

The next time you’re sitting in a meeting, and one of your ambitious colleagues throws out an idea that seems “out there”/unconventional/grandstanding, try to resist the temptation to roll your eyes. Yes, in all likelihood your colleague probably is grandstanding because that’s one of the ways ambitious people get heard. But that doesn’t mean he’s not on to something important.

When we think about disruption in business, we often think of game-changing technologies or other systemic changes. However, the world of sports offers a different perspective on disruptive practices that remind us of what the point of disruption ought to be: all about the customer.

Today, three major sports — golf, football and baseball — are being made to feel uncomfortable by their ambitious colleagues, and an interesting thing is happening. Let’s take them up one by one.

Golf. The rise of LIV Golf in 2022 was greeted by derision and much public outcry from the PGA Tour, which pointed to the upstart league’s backing by Saudi Arabia, a regime with a poor record of human rights but a bank account rich enough to recruit some of professional golf’s most illustrious and marketable names to its ranks.

Yet, while the PGA and LIV are still in the name-calling and eye-rolling phase of their relationship, the PGA is quietly adopting many of LIV’s practices. No, PGA players don’t get to wear shorts just yet as they do at LIV tournaments; nor do they play against a backdrop of barbecues and reggae or other tunes. But the PGA has begun increasing the size of its purses and eliminated the 36-hole cuts in certain events, both of which are practices that benefit players and, LIV hopes, the fans.

To watch a LIV event, such as the recent one in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, is to wonder whether professional golf everywhere in the U.S. wouldn’t benefit from fielding players who don’t all look and dress exactly alike and from injecting a little, good old-fashioned fun into the PGA’s staid brand.

No one has been more vocal in calling out certain aspects of his colleagues rush to LIV Golf riches than Rory McIlroy. McIlroy, though, was honest enough this week to recognize that LIV is also changing the professional game for the better.

“I think the emergence of LIV or the emergence of a competitor to the PGA Tour has benefited everyone that plays elite professional golf,” the Irishman recently said. “I think when you’ve been the biggest golf league in the biggest market in the world for the last 60 years, there’s not a lot of incentive to innovate. This has caused a ton of innovation at the PGA Tour.”

McIlroy hasn’t changed his mind about which league he’s loyal to, but he’s learned something and isn’t afraid to say it.

Meanwhile, over on the gridiron, the XFL, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his ownership team are resurrecting the brand initially created by Vince McMahon of WWE fame. Having failed in 2001 and 2020, the league announced its disruptive intentions with some profound but totally sensible — and fan friendly — changes. In addition to speeding up the play clock, the XFL is eliminating the most tedious play in football, the extra point, and requiring teams to choose of one of three “conversion” plays to add one, two or three points to their score.

XFL offenses will be able to throw two forward passes in one down as long as the first pass is thrown from behind the line of scrimmage, a move that will transform the experience of watching the game as well as the skillset required of players. Colleges are looking hard at the XFL not only to spice up the game but to make it safer for players by, for example, staging kickoffs within a more tightly proscribed space on the field, which the XFL does.

When asked how the league came up with the array of changes to the game, XFL commissioner Oliver Luck said, “What we did was listen to the fans. And what they told us is that they love this game, but they would like it at a little more of a faster pace and with a little more excitement.” And safer for the players.

Another sports/business leader who listened to his fans and used their feedback to accent things they liked and lose things they didn’t is Jesse Cole, the owner of the Savannah Bananas, once a college summer league baseball team. When he saw fan attendance waning during traditional baseball games, he found out what they wanted — more fun and more action, less down time — and created “Banana Ball,” a fan-friendly version of baseball that allows players to steal first, counts foul balls caught by fans as outs, encourages break dancing by umpires and ends all games promptly after two hours with the team ahead declared the winner.

Problems solved.

Like Luck, Cole says he, “realized that the best business model in the world is to just stop doing what your customers hate.” And there’s nothing baseball fans hate more than watching pitchers and batters pulling and tugging at themselves and talking into their gloves at each other while darkness settles over the bleachers. So, he got rid of it, the Bananas are thriving and now Major League Baseball is following suit by changing its hallowed rulebook to penalize time-wasting by pitchers and batters.

Disruption of the LIV Golf, XFL and Banana Ball kind offer benefits that may very well outlive the leagues or teams themselves. It is just possible that LIV Golf won’t catch on or that the XFL will suffer a third (and final?) failure. But the changes they bring through their examples can change the same-old, same-old forever, and for the better.

So, let’s celebrate the upstarts not with a bilious eye-roll but rather an affirmative nod of the old bean and ask not, “What were you thinking?” but “I like the way you’re thinking…