Nah, just tricky. It's a given that any kind of sports manga needs to put something extra in it if it doesn't want only to appeal to people who like that specific sport and doesn't want end up in giving hollow chapters of people just playing a certain sport each time. So what you call 'more than meets the eye' is an almost absolute necessity for a sports manga otherwise it will not work, hence I said they're tricky. On one hand they have the inherent problem that they need to bring forth something as dynamic as a sport with a static medium. But on the other hand if they are going to solely focus on the dynamic of the sport, well then they will have a hollow story, which will not appeal to a large crowd.
So yeah very tricky genre. I would say it's a problem almost unique to the sports genre as the sport on itself from the start almost functions as a dead weight where the author needs to cope with, while normally it's the exact opposite. For example the series Air Gear is often also tagged as a sports manga, but it's different that its 'sport' is a fictional one. It automatically elevates the series without doing anything special as its uniqueness automatically attracts a crowd. That's different when you have normal sports like football or basketball. If they will solely fall back on the sport, they're pretty much screwed.
