Anatomy of a sports market

That will be 12 McNabbs, please. And throw on some Kobes, too. But get rid of those Romos. His pinky injury is killing the price!

Ever wanted to get your piece of Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning or Sidney Crosby? Ever reminisced on the old days of trading sports cards? Ever planned to make money? Look no further than OneSeason.com.

The site is a pretty simple concept: Put money in, buy shares of professional athletes and watch as the prices rise and fall. You can buy stock in your favorite players and, if you don't see your homeboy there, you can request a player to be released in the future. Like Allen Iverson? He's being released today at an initial price offering of $5.

So how does this all actually work? You purchase a share at one price and then hold it or sell it off for a different price-one that is hopefully higher. According to the site, "Supply and demand determines price within the market"; when people want to buy more shares than there are available, the seller and buyer make an agreement through the Web-based market and trade money for athletes. If there's enough pressure from the demand side, prices will go up as sellers find someone willing to buy their athletes for higher prices. If there are more shares being sold than there are buyers, prices will decrease to attract purchases.

Now for the craziest thing about the site-when you buy some Brett Favre, you don't actually get anything. Nothing is shipped to your home, no certificate is delivered into your e-mail, no special offer for Wrangler Jeans finds its way into your mailbox. Nothing. You actually buy something worthless, hope that other people value the worthless entity at a higher price than you paid, and then sell the thing to some poor sucker while you make off with a profit, laughing hysterically all the way to the bank. Some people have accused the site of being an elaborate pyramid scheme, as it seems to funnel money from the newcomers to the veterans. In an e-mail, the OneSeason support team directly responded to this allegation: "A free market system driven solely by supply and demand is not a pyramid structure. You may also notice that we do not pay our users to induce others into the system (no referral program)." OneSeason also claims it is not a gambling site either, but rather "is a free market system that trades in perpetuity with no definable outcome, end event or odds." Translation: It's legal and it can make you some money.

Megan McBride, a OneSeason player, claimed in an Oct. 23 Time magazine article, "Stocks sinking? Be like me: Buy Eli Manning," to have made $3,600. A friend of mine who goes to Rice made more than $1,000. A student at Southern Methodist University made several thousand dollars. Just think about it-you could be watching Eli Manning throw the game winning touchdown pass on one screen, buy shares of EMAN on another screen and watch the share price (and your bank account) skyrocket on yet another. Make money while watching sports? Are you sure we were kicked out of Eden?

Problem is, there's a serpent in this paradise too. When the Web site first started, share demand was high and supply was relatively low. Everybody made money. Tons of money. Tens of thousands of times their initial investments. So more people joined. The snake slithered around, whispering greed into the ears of newcomers. Buy... buy... buy! The value of the whole market shot up to $18 million. And then it happened. It came suddenly, powerfully, irreversibly. It refused to stop for anyone. The market spiraled down into absolute free fall. Message boards were buzzing. OneSeason staffers were overwhelmed with anxious e-mails. Veterans were trying to calm the market, telling all who would listen that they had been through hard times before and the market had recovered. But to no avail. If you thought the real stock market crash was bad, you should have been there for the jock market bust. $14 million, 77 percent of the market, vanished. Share prices went from the $10 to $20 range to the $2 to $5 range. Not even Michael Jordan could dunk his way past this one. Apocalypse had arrived.

Still, the market promises to expand, both in services and in player base. In all likelihood, the site will still make savvy people some serious cash. Tony Romo's pinky won't be broken forever-watch for a spike in price in just a few days. Allen Iverson was just part of a trade deal-his release may stimulate the market. And when articles like these come out, and people hear about the site more and more, those universal gains will come back into the picture.