On January 14, 1978 the Sex Pistols ambled onto the stage at Winterland in San Francisco for what would prove to be their final show together, and the end of a disastrous U.S. tour. Confronted by violent and indifferent crowds across the states, the poster boys of England's anarchist punk movement could no longer be bothered to put together the kind of hateful, electric show they had become famous for. After a short set comprised mostly of unintelligible noise, lead singer Johnny Rotten surveyed the crowd and said through a snarling smile, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" He left the stage abruptly, and walked away from the Pistols for good.

I couldn't help being reminded of this moment in Rock'N'Roll history as I suffered through the Rockets/Timberwolves game a few weeks ago. The two teams, widely considered playoff contenders before the season began, entered the game with a combined win total of less than seventy games, and three of the league's elite superstars sitting in Diane Cannonesque seats at the end of the bench. I watched, along with the nearly 17,000 fans in attendance, as two teams with nothing to play for fumbled through four quarters of ineptitude. Blown layups. Shoddy defense. About as much excitement and atmosphere in the arena as one would find in the waiting room of a proctologist's office, but without the three-year-old copies of Good Housekeeping to keep the people entertained. I was all but waiting for the public address announcer to ask the crowds exiting the arena, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Now please, drive home safely."

Shouldn't we, the ticket-buying public, expect more for our dollar as the season winds down? Shouldn't we expect our months of support and passion to be reflected in the efforts of the athletes on the playing field? In all honesty, under the current systems employed by the professional leagues in this country, the pure and simple answer is no. Sports stars will say in interviews that they are professionals. They will furrow their brows and look directly at the interviewer while they claim to play as hard as they can every game, regardless of the standings. To borrow a phrase from those rambunctious Sex Pistols, these statements are bollocks.

NBA Action, It's Fantastic! Now piss off!

Athletes are human, and human beings are driven by incentive. We can't logically expect professional athletes, months into a grueling season, to lay their bodies on the line while at the bottom of the standings. We can't ask them to pretend they're in the middle of a heated playoff race, when they aren't within a three hour flight of a meaningful game. It's not a fair or rational expectation. The only way we can make these insignificant games significant is to implement drastic change. A change such as, perhaps, introducing relegation.

 RELEGATION!

For those of you who don't follow soccer on an international level (I'm assuming the overwhelming majority of you), the idea of relegation is going to be, well, foreign. But it's a relatively simple concept. In soccer leagues around the world, the worst three teams each season are relegated, banished to the next lower domestic league, while the three best teams in that league are promoted, and get to run with the big boys the following season.

Now before you fly off the handle and dismiss me as a lunatic, or perhaps a heretic, take a second to imagine the possibilities of implementing this type of system. Instead of 10,000 people at PNC Park in September watching the Pirates audition a roster full of triple-A players for the next season, imagine Pittsburgh-area fans flocking to the park to cheer their guts out in an attempt to keep their beloved Bucs from the dreaded "drop." Instantly the level of excitement around sports leagues would increase tenfold. Players on last place teams would dive into the crowd for loose balls, barrel into the catcher on plays at the plate, and go for the tough catch over the middle inside the two-minute warning. Wouldn't you give your all if you knew that long bus rides to Roanoke loomed that much larger with each lopsided loss? Wouldn't you be more interested in how your team finished the season if it meant the difference between attending home games against Dwayne Wade, Shaquille O'Neal and the Heat, as opposed to, say, Jamario Moon and the Fort Worth Flyers?

Initially this may seem to be a concept that actually hurts fans. It's an argument that certainly carries weight. With relegation comes an immediate loss of exposure and prestige. But the New York Knicks had the second-highest ticket prices in the entire NBA for the 2006-2007 campaign. Fans of Larry Brown's dysfunctional bunch spent, on average, more than $75 per ticket to watch a team that changed its starting lineup more frequently than the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I wouldn't consider that fan friendly, either. And will ticket prices go down next year, after perhaps the worst season in franchise history? Don't bet on it, Spike.

One needn't look further than the current situation in the Barclay's English Premier League to see this concept in all its glory. The most popular sports league on the entire planet has never known anything but a relegation system. London club Chelsea has been in first place from the season's opening whistle, and has, for all intents and purposes, had the championship wrapped up for several months. With England's current soccer equivalent of the New York Yankees in cruise control, the most compelling games now involve teams clawing and scratching to finish in 17th place when the season commences in two weeks. One club, Sunderland, has been so dreadful this season that they were officially relegated several weeks ago. But there are currently three clubs, all with extensive history and a large base of supporters, competing to avoid the two relegation spots. The games are intense, the fans are rabid, and the level of play gets better as the noose tightens.

As unlikely as it may seem, teams promoted to the higher league do not necessarily spend the next season as the sports equivavlent of the high school band's flute player, bullied by all the big scary jocks on campus. In fact, of the three teams who moved into the Premier League from the Coca-Cola Championship at the beginning of this campaign, only one, aforementioned Sunderland, will fail to remain in top-flight domestic soccer next season. In fact, the other two promoted clubs, West Ham and Wigan Athletic, are both in the top half of the league standings.

Can we reasonably envision a team from the lowly NBDL moving up into the NBA and competing with teams like San Antonio and Detroit? Would any of the country's triple-A teams be able to step on the field with the White Sox and take even one game of a four game series? No way. But with the rapidly expanding base of international talent in both basketball and baseball, is it so inconceivable that there could be, in the future, a wealth of talent extensive enough to make a relegation system feasible? If the NBA were to bring top young talent from leagues in Europe and South America stateside, stacking the NBDL with players that were fundamentally sound and hungry to prove themselves, is it that irrational to question whether one of these teams might be able to give the Trailblazers or Knicks a run for their money? Imagine the tremendous support and interest that would be generated in some of the smaller sports markets around the country, as they followed with great intensity their local team's battle to move up into Major League Baseball or the NBA.

Now that I've proposed this revolutionary concept, it's time to kill it. Time to drive a red, white, and blue stake right through its heart. Despite my best efforts I'm a realist, and I know that there is absolutely no chance that any of the American professional sports leagues would give this idea even the slightest thought. College football and the disgrace that is the BCS make it all too evident that the governing bodies of our sports universe resist change like the Olson twins would resist a heaping pile of Hooters wings. It just doesn't happen folks. To initiate relegation systems would mean overthrowing years of tradition and alienating a ton of fans. Tradition goes a long way in defining the way we look at sports, and we just do not reverse these traditions, even when they're silly or outdated (i.e. Cracker Jacks at every Major League ballpark).

The real reason this would never fly: the Benjamins, baby. Our leagues have been fashioned into teeth gnashing, revenue sharing, collective bargaining beasts over the years. Making massive structural changes to the NBA or the NFL would disrupt the delicate financial ecosystem that keeps so many owners fat, literally, and so many players fat, figuratively. In the age of billion dollar network television contracts and league-wide product sponsorship, the owners would never approve of the kind of revolution I am writing about, no matter how much excitement it added to our sporting pallets. The infrastructure of our country's minor leagues would have to be gutted and rebuilt. Lower league franchises would have to shift organizational focus away from their current function as training grounds for younger players under contract to big league clubs, and instead learn to compete on an uneven playing field with the big money outfits they have been supporting throughout their existence. Stadiums and arenas in minor league towns would have to be renovated to comply with the standards of their big brothers. Rosters would have to be overturned. Contracts would have to be torn up.

In summation, more logistic, economic, legal, and public relations headaches would arise from a move toward relegation than I have the time or mental capacity to address or solve.

So I'm left to daydream about what could be, but never will. I'm left to ponder what that mid-April game between the Houston No-Shows and the Minnesota Don't-Cares would have looked like in some kind of alternate universe, like say, the Bizarro World in the Superman cartoons, or perhaps, Italy. Both teams would have likely been clear of relegation by the date of the game, but we can't know that for sure. I can guarantee that there would have been several fewer DNP's in the box score that night if the game took place in a relegation universe. But hey, the San Franciscans who witnessed the extinguishing flame of one Rock'N'Roll's landmark bands didn't get their money refunded that January night in 1978, either. I guess we're all just stuck with being cheated once in a while. I'll focus my sports daydreaming on other, more attainable visions in the future. Hmm, like what would Yao Ming sound like singing "Anarchy in the U.K." on the karaoke machine in my living room? Hmm.....