We all agree that the America sports calendar is a mess. The NBA season starts too early, the WNBA season ends too late, and the NFL dominates everything without caring about your feelings. Also, there are simply too many months of the year when baseball is the only thing on TV.

But I can fix this. Well, kind of.

For lame reasons like long term TV-rights contracts (yawn), infinitely-complex collective bargaining agreements (boooooooring) and extremely delicate ownership of primetime and holiday broadcasting slots (as if that’s MY problem), none of this is actually going to happen. And we’re all going to take a deep breath and be okay with that.

Most revolutions don’t happen in their truest believers’ optimal timetable. Karl Marx, Sun Yat-sen, Marcus Smart. But rather than limit ourselves purely to minute changes — which would functionally solve nothing — we’re going to crank things up to 11 and radically shift the American sports calendar to make it, objectively, way better.

A couple of ground rules before we start:

1. We’re only doing five sports: I’m going to be using viewership numbers from this 2023 survey to determine which sports actually need reorganizing: which is pretty clearly the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. We’re also adding the WNBA, since it’s one of the fastest growing leagues in America and growth potential is a big part of this exercise. We’re also pointedly excluding the MLS because…
2. We don’t do soccer or any international sports because it’s too hard: I understand the MLS is a domestic league, but I lumped it in with all other intentionally-international sports (Golf, combat sports, tennis, the myriad global soccer leagues, cricket etc.) since accommodating every possible sport within the master plan, no matter how popular, would simply be too hectic.
3. We don’t do college sports, also because it’s too hard: It may seem ridiculous to leave out all college sports, particularly Division 1 College Football (which is immensely popular), but because changing around those seasons would also require modifying university calendars, we’re just… not going to do that for the sake of academic integrity.

Alright, everyone buckled in? It’s going to take three big moves, and by the end we should have a full-on mathematical proof to fix the calendar and live happily ever after. QED, let’s rock.

Move 1 – Doing Something by Doing Nothing

The NFL stays exactly where it is.

Final Result: NFL in Early September to Mid-February

When moving a trillion dates and events around, it’s going to help to have a central axis to rotate around. And being by far the most popular sport in America, the NFL seems like a good thing to leave in place.

It also makes perfect sense, since the end of summer means the start of the NFL season, while winter means the season is winding down. In the grand scheme of sports league start dates, this is one of the more logical start-end cycles we have. Compare that to the NBA’s middle-of-fall-to-vaguely-the-summer-ish schedule, this is pretty good.

Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images

Move 2 – Balancing the Basketball Budget

The NBA now starts on Christmas, and the WNBA now ends right before Christmas

Final Result:

NFL = Early September to Mid-February

NBA = Late December to Late August

WNBA = Late July to Late December

Since football is staying right where it is, we’re going to give basketball some room to breathe. There are a lot of combo football-basketball fans (myself included), and so optimizing this pairing is going to be the key to our master plan. The holiday season is our main point of attack.

Depending on the length of the NBA Finals, the NBA season is roughly 240 days long, stretching from the October 20s to the June 20s. That’s outrageously long, presenting us with the pretty gargantuan task of placing this season in its proper spot. That gives the NBA a lot of independence with its playoff run, but the October start always feels too early. Football is still getting into full swing, and I never quite want to lock into the NBA until it’s juuuust about Christmas. Putting the NBA season start there is perfect, since the NBA Finals being at the end of August isn’t some massive offense to society, and offers a smooth transition from men’s basketball to football.

But that’s only half of our basketball priorities. The WNBA has a 162-day-long season, meaning it is literally impossible for the two leagues to never overlap. But they’re currently overlapping as little as possible, with the WNBA season ending right as the NBA season begins. Economically, that’s because the two leagues both have ESPN as their main broadcast partner, but also because, spiritually, there should always be some form of professional basketball to watch. I agree with all that, but we have to flip it.

Starting the WNBA during the NBA playoffs in July is actually perfect, as the world will be locked into basketball and then sufficiently unlocked from football by the time the playoffs start in November for the WNBA to have its time to shine. And this makes the holiday season an absolute sports equinox, which we all love.

Photo by Richard A. Whittaker/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Move 3 – Indoor versus Outdoor Planning

The MLB and NHL season’s now happen at the exact same time

Final Result:

NFL = Early September to Mid-February

NBA = Late December to Late August

WNBA = Late July to Late December

MLB = Late March to Early November

NHL = Late March to Early November

They may not know it yet, but the NHL and MLB are actually natural allies. They both have cornered the market on their individual sports — though I am excited about the emergent PWHL — and have opposite weather requirements: the MLB needs perfect weather while the NHL is played indoors.

While I don’t think the MLB season is as perfectly placed as the football season, you kind of… can’t move it that much because of weather restrictions. So I don’t see the use in moving it 10 days either direction. The NHL, on the other hand, is becoming unlinked from the NBA and finding a new partner which will help them make use of the hockey-basketball combo stadiums more efficiently.

The main issue here is aggressively subordinating baseball and hockey to a crowded NBA-WNBA-NFL circuit that removes the formers historic exclusivity, but I bet everyone will be alright with it, and I’m banking on a key assumptions here:

Based largely on vibes: MLB and NHL fans are generally more exclusive than NFL and basketball fans. Perhaps I am limited by my bubble of contacts, but the super-hardcore MLB fans I know don’t care much about the other three sports, as are the super-hardcore NHL fans. Things get crowded over the summer, yes, but shouldn’t summer and the Holidays be the hype-est time for sports, when kids don’t have homework and people take the most time off?

And that’s it. While it would be jarring at first, it allows for a much more consistent diet of sports throughout the year, rather than the baseball/WNBA only situation we have over the summer and the too-early-NBA crowded together with hockey. If you have your own tweaks or suggestions, drop them in the comments below. While it may not happen in any of our lives, our human capacity to improve the world will live on in our desire for a more coherent sports calendar. Viva la Revolucion!