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eSports Now a Part of College Athletics
jyosim writes: The University of Cincinnati hosted what was possibly the largest-ever collegiate video-game tournament last weekend. At the university, the League of Legends club has become an official club sport, just like rugby or rowing. "What's happening with college e-sports right now is that we're seeing a formalization and institutionalization of what's always been present," said T.L. Taylor, a professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Like LoL is even hard.
Real gamers play Starcraft.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This isn't education.
Local historians living near Russia have noticed strange connections between it and the Feds, stretching back to the Black Plague.
ROTFL. You almost made me think you were serious up until the Fed/Plague reference.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is shooting a sport or a game?
What athletic abilities does it require?
More like the colleges are realizing that there is another bumper crop of highly marketable kids that they can exploit for multi-million dollar TV and streaming deals where they don't have to pay the players anything at all. I am waiting for the NCAA's drool to start accumulating over another pool of exploitable labor.
Otherwise this is pretty good for eSports. This can serve as a recruitment ground for skilled players as skills rarely port well from the general ladder to competitive team play. Also, as League of Legends is legally recognized as a sport in the US this might allow people to apply for visas and scholarships.
And for the people who will inevitably flood this comments section with nonsense about how eSports isn't a real sport please just stop. No one cares if they are real sports by a definition that is arbitrary to begin with, and they certainly don't want to hear your opinion about it in your relentless pursuit of overdefinition.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
New name.
Very good hand eye coordination, breathing control, all in all shooting well does require athletic ability.
It requires a very steady hand. It seems to be a sport, just as archery, Jenga and jackstraws.
Not quite.
Apparently "sport" means everybody is doing the same thing, under the same set of rules.
This is why bridge could be a "demonstration sport" at the Olympics, because everybody is playing according to a known set of rules.
So, apparently there are athletic sports, and non-athletic sports ... and athletic games and non-athletic games. When I play golf it's a game, when Tiger Woods does it it's a sport -- because I ignore most of the rules.
But, apparently, it is NOT TRUE that sports require athletic abilities ... which confuses the heck out of me. But nonetheless, bridge and chess are technically "sports".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Is shooting a sport or a game? What athletic abilities does it require?
What type of shooting? Long-range shooting requires controlled breathing and very fine (and not twitch) muscle control. Timed competitive shooting (for example 3-gun competition) again requires fine muscle control and also physical stamina/conditioning as you are required to keep up a controlled constant pace for several minutes. Straight up speed shooting requires fine muscle control and excellent hand-eye coordination and muscle memory. And then of course for any type of competitive shooting there's the stamina required for training due to standing, moving, or laying in one position for hours on end holding something weighing several pounds for long periods of time. And that doesn't even include the biathlon and other similar events.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Let's get ready ti RUMMMMMMBLEEEEEEEEEEE!
"In this corner, weighing in at 327, the Buttonmasher from Boston, the World Champeen Jason 'Couch Potato' Johnson!
"And in this corner, weighing in at 294, the Dollar Menu Don, the Permanent Indenter, Phil 'And a Diet Coke, lite on the ice, please' Pullman.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Having college teams seems like a waste. I guess a so-so gamer might benefit by getting a college scholarship to play LoL... but if they are any good and have endorsements, they can pay for college on their own.
eSports Now a Part of College Athletics
Where's that "donotwant" tag when you need it?
Seriously. Someone just fucking shoot me now. This whole "eSport" bullshit is just a demonstration of how stupid society's become.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Is shooting a sport or a game?
What athletic abilities does it require?
Depends on the shooting sport. 3-gun competition is quite vigorous, and requires dexterity and skill handling several types of firearms through various obstacles.
If you're talking about virtual shooting (as in gaming), I would have to agree with the parent. Gaming is not a sport. Then again, I wouldn't consider bowling a sport mainly due to the amount of alcohol one is practically encouraged to consume, and yet bowling scholarships exist.
In the end, we can argue about physicality all we want, but ultimately popularity will be what defines a "sport", not our masculine opinions left over from the leatherneck generation.
Being able to take the recoil without knocking yourself in the head with the gun or throwing out/dislocating your shoulder. Even a weak recoil from a .22 can give you a black eye if you don't know what in the hell you're doing. Also, aiming a real gun and shooting a target accurately isn't the same as aiming what amounts to an oversized plastic flashlight at a screen; or even lamer, moving your hand/thumb to place a cursor over some avatar's eyeball and clicking a button.
Sure they are, sport.
So if we had to categorize examples:
Etc.
You'll have feel recoil from a .22 if you're shooting it out of a straw. No one gets a black eye shooting .22.
You have widespread cheating, game fixing, doping and - funnily enough - injuries.
So, it's only fair to upgrade multiplayer games to the status of sport.
"the League of Legends club has become an official club sport"
As someone who was the Vice-President of Cincinnati Mens' Club lacrosse, they are not considered a 'sport' by the school. The club lacrosse team is not recognized by the school as a sport. Unless they are being sponsored by the Athletic Department, are not a 'sport' They are only a student group.
Trust me, we were almost shut down by some a-hole administrator for not putting the word 'Club' on our shirts and our official name we registered with the NCLL (club lacrosse governing body).
All student interest groups are part of a department known as the "Student Activities Board" which takes a fee charged as part of tuition, and disperses it to any student lead group that shows interest and fills out the paperwork. They do not have 'sport' and non-sport' classifications and the club can be anything you wish.
The anime club, lacrosse club, ultimate frisby, LGBT groups, and even this video game group all get the same budget(scales by the number of students in the group) and report to the same administrators.
The school has nothing to do with this, give the credit to the students who put this all together without much help at all from the faculty and staff at UC.
UC does not give a shit about video games, and neither does their athletic department.
So do fps like quake or UT. You need fine motor skill and discipline to play those at any decent level. Doesn't mean they're considered sports. I think the sport vs game discussion is more about ego and self importance than anything else. Chess is considered a sport, too, and it does not require significant hand/eye coordination.
I understand why this stuff is so popular in Korea, they have the statistically lowest testosterone levels in the developed world, but here in the west? "E-sports" gimme a break.
ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16332934
Dota 2 pays more (15kk USD on last international tournament).
Dota 2 is more balanced.
Dota 2 is truly F2P (all heroes available from start).
I don't think LoL is suitable for a competitive environment.
Then again, I wouldn't consider bowling a sport mainly due to the amount of alcohol one is practically encouraged to consume, and yet bowling scholarships exist.
I have always argued that if you can drink while doing it, it is not a sport. This of course excludes Babe Ruth and baseball.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
At the university, the League of Legends club has become an official club sport, just like rugby or rowing.
That means it is a club but it doesn't mean it is athletic like rugby or rowing. Being a official university club means that the university sanctions the activity and maybe gives it a bit of funding and support. Which is awesome. Universities do this for lots of worthy of activities and it's always nice to see a new one added. However, calling it a part of college athletics is a bit of a reach since the amount of athleticism involved is minute. (no appreciable strength, balance, gross motor skills, etc required) I was a college athlete and while I enjoy video games as much as most, I don't consider them athletics. Fun? Sure. Cool? I think so. Sports? Maybe. Athletics? No.
Esports? more like video games and chess is a fucking board game.
And this is coming from a Nerd/Geek/Hacker
Honestly, if bridge and chess are considered sports, why not video games?
Very few people really consider bridge or chess a sport even including people who play seriously. Video games would probably fall into the same category as those would whatever that category happens to be. If you want to call it a sport then I can't really argue with that since a lot of activities are considered sports. (synchronized swimming anyone?) But it certainly does NOT fall under the heading of athletics. There is no appreciable athletic ability involved here including gross motor skills, balance, strength, or cardio-vascular conditioning.
So, all video games are sports because the programmed definitions of their rules are literally defined and totally unambiguous in the software that only allows interactions in agreement with the rules?
Is shooting a sport or a game?
Both. Either. Plus it requires some amount of athleticism.
What athletic abilities does it require?
Both fine and gross motor coordination. Physical strength. A modest amount of stamina and balance in some cases. Breath control. Hand-eye coordination. Plus if you are talking about biathon which is a shooting sport it requires substantial cardiovascular conditioning plus the ability to run or ski. If you are talking about bench shooting though the amount of athleticism required nearly inconsequential.
ESPN shows professional poker. Your argument is invalid.
I just hope they're able to get enough girl gamers to play so that the colleges don't have to cut other sports to ensure equal participation.
Typically eSport tournaments have written rules that regulates what third party software is allowed on the computers. (Some peripherals might need extra drivers so the computers can not always remain totally unmodified.)
There are also typically rules against communicating with non-players. Some tournaments specify what game settings will be used and sometimes what maps are played on.
Anyway, I don't really care if it is called eSports or something else. There is a need to distinguish between regulated competitive gaming and non-regulated, but apart from that any word works fine.
I'm just going to lean back and smile at the people that feel that their self image is hurt by computer games being called sports.
I am waiting for the NCAA's drool to start accumulating over another pool of exploitable labor.
You'll be waiting a long time. I was a college athlete in division one under the NCAA. I assure you that the NCAA wants nothing to do with so called esports. The folks in charge don't even consider it a sport no matter what you or I might call it. Plus if the NCAA gets involved then there are Title IX issues that come into play given that the player demographics skew heavily male. You seriously think a D1 college is going to cut an athletic sport for varsity video games?
No, even if esports become a thing in colleges the NCAA is probably not going to be the parent organization.
Is Poker a sport? Monopoly? Snakes and Ladders?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Great, now we can meaninglessly give away free rides to college for people to blow off class and play video games instead of blowing off class and playing with some sort of equipment outside.
Don't know where you went to school but I was a college athlete and I didn't get to blow off any classes nor did I get a "free ride".
Beer Pong?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Look, let's be clear hear ... I'm not championing the cause of "e-Sports", or saying I necessarily give a damn ... because I don't.
What I am saying is there are already precedents in which bridge and chess, for example, have been defined as sports ... at the Olympic level no less.
It's too damned late for us to quibble over the definition of sport, as far more authoritative bodies than a bunch of nerds on Slashdot have already weighed in.
When I first heard this particular definition of sport I was saying "What the fsck is this crap?" But then eventually you have to realize that it's too late for us to get a vote.
So, I'll just reiterate: if the damned IOC recognizes bridge and chess as sports, why the hell not video games? And if you don't like it, you can take it up with the IOC, because I'm not the one who made those definitions.
And apparently it has nothing at all to do with athletic ability.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Found the gentlesir neckbeard!
Of course it is, can't leave the mentally disabled out of being able to enjoy sports too.
I got an athletic scholarship to the University of Chicago thanks to my prowess at Candyland. Also lettered in Operation and Beer Pong. [GO MAROONS!]
But with Title IX, they have to allow girls on the teams now, and that means eSports on campus are shot to hell because everyone knows women lack the physical strength and coordination to play these challenging sports.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, that leaves out shooting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't think you ever want to use "ESPN" to decide an argument.
Exhibit A: Darren Rovell
Exhibit B: Dan Le Batard
Exhibit C: Skip Bayless
You are welcome on my lawn.
And then the Olympics apologized and promised to never make the same mistake again.
You are welcome on my lawn.
LOL, did they really?
I've honestly lost track, and have no stake in what is the definition of "sport". The link I provided says chess and bridge still are.
I just remember at the time having discussions about how a table full of old people with walkers could end up being an Olympic sport, and how that completely defined what most people understood "sport" to mean.
I'm just pointing out that train has already sailed.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, that leaves out shooting.
There's a difference between shooting and rednecks getting drunk and plinking highway signs with a .22 from their truck.
disclaimer: I am a Southerner who owns guns (even .22s) and has hunted, but I sold my truck and I've never drank and handled a firearm.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Games are sports. Any recreation or pastime can be. They're just as much sport as sitting in a tree waiting for a deer to take your bait, playing chess, playing poker behind dark glasses, or being a 2nd string player sitting on a bench the whole game. They're also sport in the sense of being mocked or derided, which I know people who share that view of "Professional Sports" as well.
Games are not Athletics, sure. But who cares? Arguing "Games are not sports because gamers are not athletic" just makes sounds like the meathead jocks from after school specials.
ESPN airs Magic: The Gathering tournaments.
The History Channel shows ice truckers and crabbing.
In Texas, they call that, "being gay".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have no idea. But neither is now an Olympic sport, so I choose to believe that they did.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Then again, I wouldn't consider bowling a sport mainly due to the amount of alcohol one is practically encouraged to consume, and yet bowling scholarships exist.
Does that mean baseball isn't a sport, since there's frequently beer when a bunch of 40-somethings get together to play once a week?
Professional bowlers don't drink alcohol during competition any more than professionals in other sports.
They may not have moved forward with making them a full Olympic sport, but I don't think they've rescinded the designation.
In fact, it looks like there's still legal wrangling on the topic, and it sounds as if it's not entirely out of the Olympics:
I read this more as, yes, it's still a sport, no, it isn't yet an Olympic event.
Suddenly I'm picturing Olympic teams of a bunch of grannies in track suits and walkers. And it's freakin' hilarious.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As for the diversity issues they might as well not exist. As you said gaming is male dominated, but so is football, and at least in the case of football no one will do anything because there is too much money in it. Assuming (and I realize that my arguments rest on this assumption) that gaming can be as successful at the college scene as in the professional scene, the money will quash any significant action.
I'm afraid you are mistaken about the effects of Title IX. What would happen is that other men's activities (sports) would get pushed out to keep the gender balance. Football does that in men's college sports now. It takes all the oxygen out of the room for other men's sports. It gets something like 65 scholarships and there is no equivalent sport on the women's side of the ledger. Less popular men's sports typically get the ax to feed the beast. In my sport of wrestling there were something like 160 D1 programs 30 years ago. Now there are 77 last I counted. Most of these are casualties of the effect of football with respect to Title IX.
In addition its not like it would take much money to start the club.
More than you think if you want to do it in a big way. You'll need a travel budget, facilities to train, equipment to train with, insurance, etc. For comparison my sport is wrestling which is not a particularly expensive sport in D1 college and the typical budget of a D1 college wrestling team is around $400-600K per year. Some a bit less and a few a lot more. Usually the program exists thanks to alumni donations and the coaches do a lot of fundraising. Lately the big thing is to get an endowment for the program so that the funding doesn't come from the athletic department budget at all. I would imagine any esport program would end up with a similar sort of financial picture.
The future won't /really/ be here until
A: There are scholarships for fantastic fraggers and promising puzzlers.
B: These sports are available at a High School level
You know, like in VGHS... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Game_High_School
They show the world series of poker on ESPN, so the folks at the largest cable TV sports network think poker is a sport. If you don't think there are skills involved in poker, go ahead and try a game for money at a table containing players who are good at it.
Monopoly contains relatively few decisions, though there is skill involved in trading properties with other people -- if you think it contains no skill, go ahead and enter one of the monopoly tournaments leading to the world championships; they give real money to the winners...
Snakes and ladders, if I recall correctly, contains no actual skill, as there are no decisions to be made by the player, and thus is not a sport (it requires neither athletic abilities nor decision-making).
Twinkies are to Health Foods.
And how much time does this take vs class time?
Right now football and basketball can take 40-60 hours a week with a travel and game schedule that makes players miss class.
They should be paid employees that don't need to go class / are forced to take a full time class load that are some places is loaded with joke classes.
And they need to have minor leagues for NBA and NBA. Like they do with the MLB / NHL.
Also at some schools esports is a joke robert morris university you get up to 50 percent of tuition and 50 percent of room and board. That's worth up to $19,000 per student per year. Wow you can go to an other school for the same price or less and just for school with out the team getting in the way of class.
I don't want my favorite pass time to become a spectacle sport. This will create a market environment where publishers and developers will cater to whatever Gaming Association is formed from this sudden public interest in my basement dwelling cohorts. The industry is already in a decline in terms of overall product quality (games come out broken and neutered with dlc, or are clones of previous releases, and we are told to dealwithit.gif). And if we are going to consider sitting stationary in a chair for several hours at a time to be a showing of "athleticism" because "it's popular" then perhaps there are some other definitions and regulations that could be changed to reflect this new definition of athletics. Perhaps being bound to the house because of a disability is not reason enough to obtain public assistance, after all, sitting in a chair watching pixels and moving your hand in coordination with those pixels is a sport!
Get rid of the football / basketball + maybe baseball from college and sports can go back to being the max of 20 hours a week thing with big stuff scheduled not to get in the way of class.
College costs to much and the players don't really get the best use out of there not so free college (better off now days then in the past) and if they get hurt they can get kicked off of that scholarship and left with a line of joke classes that you are not on the team may not count as part of a degree or transfer if you need to go some where cheaper.
Twister?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
also what about systems being online that may even have forced game / app / driver / drm / os updates that may not hit all system at the same time even a rolling roll out over a few hours.
Video games are not a sport
YES. This.
Sure, it can be a sport if it wants, it has all the requirements. Hell, if you have ever played a really heated competitive game, you can break out in buckets of sweat and have a heart beat of well over 150 easily. And this ain't a bunch of fatties we are talking about. I've honestly never known a fat gamer besides one friend who needs to take steroid treatment till the day he dies. (I've been on steroid treatment myself on and off several times in the space of 3 years, and god damn it is hell. Hopefully never again )
However, this is no athletic anything.
This is just sheer concentration and twitch-tier* reactions that leads to a lot of load on the heart, like a typical sport but without too much of the physical strain on the whole body.
This would be like exercising only your arms, or something, but not directly.
It is an indirect sport, mostly. It is the body being in the ALERT phase, the fight or flight response.
It should become a new sub-class of sports to really define these kinds of events. There are sports which affect the whole body actively, then there are ones which affect the body indirectly.
* On that note, I've actually been doing research myself on the twitch-movements side of things.
I've figured out a pretty good way of training them effectively.
In the space of 4 months I managed to increase the size of my arms by like, 2cms~ all around, fairly passively just by exercising at random times through the day.
It was pretty interesting how little effort it actually took for that gain using the method I do.
Whenever this subject comes up there seems to be a lot of fear and anger along with a healthy dose of urination, I assume to make sure everyone knows where the territorial boundaries are. Nerds be comin' to take our jerbs!
The bottom line is if there are enough people who want to watch eSports then eSports is going to be a thing no matter how much pissing and moaning people do about it. For full disclosure I have about as much respect for eSports as I have for irlSports (read: not much)
I'm not even going to enter the 'is a sport'/'is not a sport' argument, the problem I see is lack of historical consistancy.
Basketball, Chess, Hockey, rugby and rowing all exist throughout the decades with minor rules tweaks at most. Will students in 20 years still be joining LoL club? Or playing some other video game?
I mean good on them, but this means about as much as having a rollerblade club in 1990. Maybe some colleges did and had races and then the fad died any they stopped.
Not necessarily. Software can apply different rules to different players. Many games are asymmetric.
Also, I'm not sure to what degree random variation is allowed. Are two players actually playing by the same rules if one of them spawns near random epic-level loot and the other spawns near the highest level monster and no weapons or armour? Perhaps you need "symmetric randomness" where a random value is used in two places, or a common random seed between two players.
That does imply that things like timed speedruns of the same deterministic single-player game is a sport though (most platformers I can think of are basically deterministic).
If you play chess, you join the chess club. You can even have competitions with other schools. But it's not a sport and it's not sponsored by the athletics competition and no one was inane enough to invent the word "cSports". What's wrong with being "an official club" as opposed to "an official club sport"?
But then again, fox hunting is considered a sport even when you're guaranteed a kill.
As a hardcore gamer that finished "Nightmare" mode in most games for the last 40 years, I understand that out of the gate, I know exactly what kind of dedication goes into playing hard, and it IS real. My crew and I were in the top 1%.
But that said, watching my kid play Water Polo... seriously, gamers are a bunch of fuckin' posers. And my kid by choice would play TF2. He's a vicious spy.
The old line was 'no pain no gain'. That's the problem with e-sports. No pain.
I don't know.. I'm sure if you asked avid fans, they'd like to believe they are. If you ask people who think only athletics count, they'd likely say no. Both camps' reasoning probably boils down to ego.
Not "eSports", that's really just a money making thing like World Series of Poker. I can understand that perfectly well.
I mean collage athletics, why does it even exist.
I'm from Australia, if you want to go into sports you apply to attend a sporting institution (such as the Australian Institute of Sport) or start playing in local leagues and work your way up. If you go to a collage or university, you're going there to use your brain.
Having college athletics/sports only takes valuable spots and resources away from educating people who can use that.
I have to wonder how many collage football players fail to make it into any kind of league. They're left with no education and likely end up in a dead end job, meanwhile they occupied a collage placement that could have been given to someone who wanted to learn a practical skill in science or even liberal arts that would have given them better job prospects.
In Australia, sports in collages and universities are more of a hobby. Students who are studying or staff will generally form their own teams and practice/play after hours. It doesn't make sense to use an educational institution to train sports people, surely a dedicated sporting institution would be a better idea (and use of resources).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Whether they involve running around throwing/kicking balls on a field, twitching a mouse, or moving bits of plastic on a board, they're all games. They all have the potential to be done for fun or professionally. The fact that people (for some strange reason) are willing to watch others play competitive (and even non competitive) video games, suggests this. To me, 'sport' is a distinction without a difference. Usually, the people I run into who want to draw lines are those who think their particular game is a cut above others' games. For me, I'd rather be playing than watching, and that goes for any of them.
If you want to argue from authority, chess is considered a sport by the IOC (but it is not contested so wtf?) according to wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
that was your first mistake
Game updates are known by the tournament beforehand. Apps are not installed and will not be updated. Automatic OS and driver updates are typically disabled.
DRM updates typically comes with the game updates.
For larger tournaments the game developers and publishers avoid pushing out game changing updates the weeks before the tournament.
If you play chess, you join the chess club. You can even have competitions with other schools. But it's not a sport and it's not sponsored by the athletics competition and no one was inane enough to invent the word "cSports". What's wrong with being "an official club" as opposed to "an official club sport"?
But then again, fox hunting is considered a sport even when you're guaranteed a kill.
They're all games and they're all equally trivial in the grand scheme of things. I see no major difference between American Football/Basketball/Hockey and candy-crush/angry-birds/WoW (except that the latter has orders of magnitude more players than the former while the former has orders of magnitude more viewers than the latter).
Seriously, too many people forget that their favourite sport is ultimately just another game.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
If you play chess, you join the chess club. You can even have competitions with other schools. But it's not a sport and it's not sponsored by the athletics competition and no one was inane enough to invent the word "cSports". What's wrong with being "an official club" as opposed to "an official club sport"?
Being a sport seems to involve having money at stake and a significant number of people willing to pay to support it as a requirement.
Well then we disagree. I see a difference between "game" and "sport".
You can have money at stake and a significant number of people willing to pay to support it without it being a sport - ie, poker is not a sport in my view. Backstabbing in the office would be considered a sport by that definition.
On the other hand, you have have little or no money at stake and few people willing to support it and it's still a sport - Calvin Ball.
There are things offiicially categorized as a sport by lovers of that sport, but which I don't think are really sports (or games). To me, a sport needs some amount of physical exertion or exercise and should be a physical activity; thus chess doesn't count in my view, despite some official people calling it a sport. Bass fishing isn't a sport to me because it's minimally physical, but hunting could be because there's typically some amount of hiking involved (and still stretching the definition).
For an eSport, I'd like to see it done like biathlons. Run a mile, play an FPS for ten minutes, run another mile, play the deathmatch level, run another mile, do a jumping puzzle without falling, race to the finish line.
Well, I didn't mention my opinion as to what the differences between a game or sport were, merely my opinion on societies opinion on such was.
Arena Football League's rules for indoor gridiron football used to be patented. Other leagues just chose to play different rules that forgo rebound nets.
Then why not put your money into developing a MOBA under a free software license, to be maintained and rebalanced by the e-sports community?
I see no major difference between American Football/Basketball/Hockey and candy-crush/angry-birds/WoW (except that the latter has orders of magnitude more players than the former while the former has orders of magnitude more viewers than the latter).
One difference is that gridiron football, basketball, and ice hockey have been around since before 1923. This means there's no entity with the exclusive public performance right to prevent a new football, basketball, or hockey league from attracting viewers.