Over the weekend, Will Leitch had a very smart piece about the NFL in New York magazine. You can read it here. I like Leitch a lot and this essay if very much worth your time. He contends that a variety of factors have converged to cripple the NFL—safety, politics, oversaturation—and that football may already be a dead sport walking.
I’m paraphrasing and like I said, you should read his piece. But I want to take issue with one small section of it, which is trivial, and expand a bit on another, which is more consequential.
First, here’s Leitch contrasting the shrinking NFL with the expanding NBA:
I think Leitch is overstating the success of the NBA. Have a gander at the association’s TV ratings over the last couple of decades. Now, you might look at last year’s NBA Finals and say, “Hey, they got their best TV ratings since 1998!” And they did! But do you know what happened in 1998? Michael Jordan won his last championship. And in 1999 the NBA’s ratings fell off a cliff.
In 1998, the NBA had its most-watched Finals ever, with an average rating of about 19 million viewers. Last year’s “record setting” Finals averaged a little more than 11 million viewers, a difference of nearly 50 percent. But it’s even worse than that: The 2017 Finals wasn’t just worse off than the 1998 Finals—it would have been the least-watched NBA championship series between 1982 and 1998.
Today’s NBA does not look anything like the future. But once upon a time it did. From 1982 to 1998 the NBA exploded in popularity, both in attendance and TV ratings and in mind-share of our shared sports culture. That time frame happens to coincide almost exactly with the professional career of Michael Jeffrey Jordan. More than any other sport in my lifetime—and maybe any other sport, ever—Jordan was the NBA. And you can tell how fully the two were intertwined by the way the association’s popularity cratered the minute he left the court.
What the NBA is seeing now isn’t a “resurgence.” It’s a dead-cat bounce. The association is only now finding its natural level of popularity after a cycle of colossal boom and terrible bust. And that level is likely to be significantly higher than professional hockey and significantly lower than professional baseball.
Please understand that I mean no disrespect to basketball. It’s my first sports love. I lived and died with the Sixers as a kid. I own a signed Allen Iverson jersey and I have a ball signed by Larry Bird in my office. After I graduated college I spent four months driving around the country and playing basketball in all of the lower 48 states. (By the by, I’ve since managed to get court time in Alaska, Hawaii, and Iceland.) I’m just a realist about the breadth and depth of the sport’s appeal at the professional level.
I have a couple theories about why the NBA has structural problems, but they’re not sexy because I don’t think it has much to do with politics or race or culture. I would submit that the association’s fundamental flaw is that it’s the only major professional league to combine guaranteed player contracts with a team salary cap. These twin distortions lead to all sorts of problems with the product, the biggest of which is that teams can be mired in a decade (or more) of misery based on one bad personnel decision, which writes off huge segments of local fanbases for a generation at a time and makes the entire enterprise hostage to the existence of a single mega-star.
* * *
But that’s a subject for another day. The more important point in Leitch’s piece is that he puts his finger on the single most fundamental aspect of the NFL’s decline. It’s not CTE or kneeling or Trump’s tweets or insensitive team names. It’s the supply of games.
This collapse of the NFL we’re witnessing is not new. It’s been happening for a long time just below the waterline. A buddy of mine, Steve Czaban, used to keep a running count on the waiting list for Redskins season tickets. When I first moved to Washington it was something like 35 years. Then it was 20 years. Then 15 years. Then 10 years.
Today the wait list for Redskins season tickets is 17 seconds. Not a typo. (And the team is even offering $100 gift cards to people who buy a season ticket package.)
So what’s happened over the last 20 years? Lots of things, including high-definition television and the internet. But the most foundational shift as far as the NFL is concerned is the available supply of games for TV viewing.
As recently as 1986, you could watch three professional tackle football games a week. There was a 1 p.m. slot on Sunday. Another at 4 p.m. on Sunday. And then the bonus game on Monday night. That was it. Three games a week, tops. Football was a scarce commodity; watching it was special.
In 1987 the NFL added a Sunday night game. In 2005 they added a Thursday night game. Suddenly the supply of games had increased by 66 percent.
Then, in 2009, the NFL added the Red Zone Channel, which offers people wall-to-wall coverage of the league as a whole on Sunday afternoons—but only shows highlights, as they happen.
There are two ways to look at the Red Zone Channel. The first is as a high-energy, fast-moving experience which packages football for the modern audience. That’s what the NFL thinks it’s giving its audience.
But allow me to explain what the Red Zone really is: It’s a seven-hour advertisement each week during which the NFL tells people, “Hey, football is mostly pretty boring. Come here and we’ll just show you the good stuff.”
What business would ever risk making that sort of statement that about its product? A business that is focused entirely on short-term profit maximization.
If you want another example of the NFL’s short-term thinking, look at the rise of fantasy football. Gambling has always been inextricably linked to football—the game is such a perfect vehicle for betting that if it didn’t exist, Las Vegas would have invented it. But the NFL was always militant in trying to deny and separate betting from its business.
Until fantasy football.
The NFL jumped into fantasy football with both feet, thinking either that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or that fantasy players would somehow broaden the sport’s appeal. And maybe it worked for a spell. But fantasy football is essentially the same proposition as the Red Zone Channel: It encourages people to view the NFL product in a way that didn’t necessarily mean watching NFL games.
The NFL’s overriding strategic goal should be getting people to watch games on television. That’s the business they’re in. So, again, why would you encourage side businesses that tell your audience they don’t really need to consume the main product? It’s madness.
Because in the long term there’s a big difference between a fan who sits on his couch watching games every Sunday and a fan who does other things, but checks in regularly with his fantasy tracker. The NFL seems not to have grasped that this second fan is essentially worthless to the league.
From where I sit, the solution to the NFL’s problems is obvious: Cut off the Red Zone Channel, kill the Thursday night game, and maybe the Sunday night game, too. Winch back the supply. Make the product scarce. Get people to actually watch football games again.
But I don’t know that the league could do this, even if it wanted to.
There are just too many stakeholders with close to veto-power. Cutting the supply would inflict huge short-term financial pain on all of the teams, and the loss in league TV dollars would disproportionately the impact small-market teams who depend on revenue sharing. So there would be an ownership bloc resolutely opposed to it. The players’ union would fight the move, because even if fewer televised games guaranteed the long-term health of the league, it would shrink the revenue pie for the guys playing right now. And that’s who the union exists to serve.
The NFL has been incredibly foolish over the last 15 years, but even if they suddenly got very smart, I don’t think there’s any going back. Which means that ultimately, Leitch may be right that we’ve begun the long, slow waning of football in America.
And just in time for my Eagles to be 10-1.
Go figure.
