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Sponsorships are down, attendance is slipping and staffers are being jettisoned to the unemployment line.

The San Diego Padres owner wants out of baseball, while his counterpart at the New York Mets reportedly lost a fortune with Bernie Madoff. Neither the Dallas Cowboys nor the New York Giants can find a company willing to put its name on the door of their new stadiums. NBA season-ticket renewal rates are down. The Arena Football League is closing its doors--at least for now--while the Houston Comets basketball team, the original powerhouse of the WNBA, is folding the tent for good.

NBA Commissioner David Stern says the league says he's concerned about the economy's effect on the league, but he doesn't plan to scale back aggressive plans to grow the business in China and other overseas locations. "We're moving along prudently," he says, "We fully expect to have to work doubly hard when the economy is difficult."

For the first time anyone can remember, the usually bulletproof sports industry is feeling an economic pinch along with the rest of the world. Make no mistake, pro sports should weather the economic storm better than most industries. People are passionate about sports and are willing to shell out cash for the diversion a game can provide. Still, teams and players will be making do with less for a while. As with any other business, sometimes it takes an economic slump to shake management into paying closer attention to costs.

"No one is immune," says NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, whose league has seen a 1% dip in attendance this year, even though most of those tickets were purchased well in advance of the financial crisis. Think of how many empty seats that could mean by the fall of 2009. "We're concerned about next year's attendance," McCarthy says.

As a media-driven league, the NFL is less susceptible to a slump at the gate than most other sports. But other concerns include the drawn-out naming-rights sagas in New York and Dallas and the ability to charge premium prices for the post season games. The NFL is lowering prices 10% across the board for January 2009 playoff games and scaling back some Super Bowl tickets to $500 a pop from $800.