Dumping Them Out: Rings Culture Ruined Sports
Welcome back to an extra special Super Bowl episode of Dumping Them Out. In honor of the Super Bowl, I will be writing a blog that belittles the importance of winning one, and belittles the importance of championships as a whole. Rings culture is the worst thing that's ever happened to sports.
On Friday, Barstool Sports' own Meek Phill, of standing-behind-the-glass-during-Picks Central, and filming Barstool Sports employees from awkward positions fame gave the worst, most 2025 internet-brain take I've ever heard. This past week, Lamar Jackson missed out on his 3rd MVP. He was beat out by Josh Allen. Some people found that to be controversial. Lamar Jackson had the better season if you're looking strictly at the numbers. But Lamar had more talent around him. He's already won 2 MVP's, whereas this was Josh Allen's first. I'm a huge Lamar Jackson advocate. I love everything about the way he plays. It drives me nuts when people use his running ability to disparage him as a QB, and I think people hold him to a wildly unfair standard. Lamar Jackson is criticized in a way no other QB is. But even I, when looking at the seasons they both had, considering the players they had around them, can't be mad that Josh Allen won MVP. He deserved it.
Meek Phill on the other hand had a more galaxy brain reaction…
"3 MVP's and no Super Bowls is also a bad look" - Meek Phill
No. No it is not. That is a remarkably dumb take that only somebody who's brain has been completely fried by a life lived on the internet would come up with. More MVP's = better career. It's not deeper than that. No matter how many Super Bowls the player doesn't win. The fact that statements like that are even being thrown out there shows how far gone the world of sports is with the "championship or bust" mindset. Or "rings culture", as some like to call it.
Obviously championships play a huge role. You can't not talk about championships when evaluating a player's career. But the emphasis put on championships has gotten out of hand. We've reached a point where a player can accomplish incredible things in the regular season, be one of the two or three best football players in the world over the course of 17 games, and in some people's eyes that actually makes their career worse because they didn't win a Super Bowl. If you see football that way, you've completely lost the plot of what sports are about. It's sad how prevalent that way of thinking has become, and it's legitimately starting to ruin sports as a whole.
Consider the NBA. One of the biggest gripes fans have (probably the biggest) is the trend of "load management". Instead of giving it their all night-in and night-out, players take nights off to rest during the regular season. Fans despise it. It's soft, it's lazy, it shows no heart, Michael Jordan would never, etc. But why do you think load management ever became a thing in the first place? Because the only thing fans, analysts, bitch-ass Barstool Sports bloggers, and even some players give any credit for is championships. LeBron is the perfect case study for this. Why should LeBron bother playing every regular season game if taking 15 nights off makes him a better player in the playoffs when things matter? NBA fans incessantly have the "Who's the GOAT? Michael Jordan or LeBron James?" debate. Every single time the debate comes down to "Michael Jordan has 6 rings". There's not a thing LeBron could do in the regular season that will ever trump the fact that Michael Jordan won more championships. So why would he waste any unneeded energy on it? If LeBron played all 82 regular season games this year and lost in the NBA Finals, nobody would look back on the 2025 season and say, "Sure LeBron lost in the end, but you gotta give him credit for giving his all in January."
We've reached a point where your legacy is better off missing a season due to injury than being a top 5 player in the league and losing in the playoffs. Even if LeBron does manage to catch Michael Jordan in rings, people will look at their careers side-by-side and with a straight face say, "Well, Michael Jordan never lost a finals". They'd harp on all the NBA Finals LeBron lost, and give him zero credit for winning his conference 12 times. Michael Jordan genuinely did more for his legacy by quitting basketball in the prime of his career than LeBron did by carrying a dog shit Cleveland Cavaliers roster on his back to the NBA Finals and losing to team that featured Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. A super team who everyone hated, and only existed because players like Kevin Durant felt the need to win a ring by any means necessary or else his career would be a complete failure. It's all so backwards, and sports are worse off because of it
Honestly, I think the Jordan vs LeBron debate is what really kicked rings culture into high gear. People hated LeBron so much, and were so unwilling to even entertain the idea that he might be on Michael Jordan's level, that the ESPN analysts of the world went so fucking hard on the "Jordan has 6 rings" argument, that it seeped into the rest of sports. Part of me thinks Barstool is at fault as well. Barstool Sports grew on the back of Boston sports. They had Tom Brady with the Patriots, and every other professional sports team in the city winning championship after championship. Boston has some of the loudest more obnoxious sports fans in the world. All lead by Dave Portnoy. And of course Dave and the rest of Boston are going to say "rings are all that matter". That's what fits their narrative best. But sports fans as a collective just rolled over and accepted it. Probably in part because they don't like LeBron either, and it coincides with their "Michael Jordan is the GOAT" take. But also because sports are a team game. That's the lesson we should be teaching our kids. Coming together with your brothers to win a championship seems like "the right thing" to care about. Which it is. I'm not saying championships shouldn't be everyone's main goal. But it shouldn't be the only thing fans and players are allowed to celebrate either. It shouldn't be the only thing that matters when you're evaluating a player's career as a whole.
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I could yell between Boob GIFs about this topic forever. It's ruining the NFL, as half the teams in the league have fan bases who would rather their team roll over and die so they can get a better draft pick than cheer for a playoff run. Because what's the point of making the playoffs if you aren't going to win the Super Bowl? College football is a whole weird thing in itself. People are now complaining about the 12-team playoff devaluing the regular season. But that isn't a college football problem. If you can't see the value in a game if it doesn't have a direct impact on who plays for the National Championship at the end of the year, that's a you problem. Why doesn't winning a conference championship matter? Why doesn't going undefeated in the regular season mean anything? In any sport, you could argue that winning the regular season is more impressive than getting hot at the right time and going on a playoff run. Sports don't have to be so black & white. A player can not win the championship and have a better season than a player who does. But it shouldn't even be about who's better. They're just different things. But for some reason, winning a championship has become the ONLY thing that matters. To the point that not winning one nullifies everything else that player did. It's beyond ridiculous, and it sucks to see sports boiled down to championships when there are so many different aspects of it that are worth celebrating.
People will read this and think it's the stupidest take of all time. They'll get on their high horse about sports being a "team game", and how you're basically Hitler if you care about individual accomplishments. But in reality, it's the people who diminish careers down to number of championships who spitting in the face of "team sports". It wasn't only Tom Brady who won those Super Bowls. Patrick Mahomes isn't the only reason the Chiefs are great. Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson aren't the only reason the Bills and Chiefs haven't gotten over the hump. There's so much more that goes into winning than what one player can bring. If Josh Allen were drafted by the Chiefs, he very well might be the one going for the three-peat right now. Individual accomplishments and team accomplishments are entirely different. Win or lose, a championship is never on the shoulders of one player.
Sorry I know I'm rambling. It just drives me crazy the way people talk about sports in absolutes. Like sports are a binary thing. I'm not saying we don't have our priorities in order. Championships should be the ultimate goal. But we give individual players way too much credit for wins and losses, and put significantly too much emphasis on championships. It's a lazy way to look at things, it's a cop out of an argument when comparing careers, and I despise the way sports are debated on the internet.