Guest Post by The Zman
Pretty much the only reason I ever owned a television or had a cable subscription was so I could watch sports. Growing up, we only have a few channels and they were often so fuzzy you could not watch them. Television was just not a central part of my life as a kid, so I never developed the habit. I grew up on sports, so as I got older I did what everyone else did and got cable and a television. In truth, I bought my first TV after a girl I was dating said she would not come over to my place if I did not have a television.
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Over the years, the only thing I bothered watching with any regularity was sports. Even as the cable companies kept jacking up the rates, I liked sports enough to keep paying the rate. In fairness, the number of games kept rising and the quality of the television got better, as the prices went up. When I was a kid we got one NFL game on Sunday. If I want to watch every NFL game on a Sunday, I can do it now. The same is true of college and other sports. It really is an amazing change just in my lifetime.
I no longer have a cable subscription. I’ll watch movies off Amazon or off the Kodi, but that’s the stuff I can get free. I stopped watching the NFL a few years ago, even when I still had cable. I’m not sure what happened. The games just got boring to me. I’ll still watch a college football game, but I’m not arranging my schedule around it. Basketball stopped interesting me in the 90’s, mostly because I’m white. The only sport I will watch is baseball and I primarily follow it over the internet and through the box score.
It’s popular to say that the NFL is struggling due to the player protests. There’s certainly something to that, but it feels more like the final straw than the prime reason. I have friends who were regular fans, going to games and watching on TV, but now they don’t follow the NFL at all. At the same time, they cut the cord and started disengaging from sports media too. That’s not just the protests. There’s something else going on in the culture that is causing people to rethink their interest in professional sports.
A few years ago, it was received wisdom that the NFL, and to a lesser extend college football, was the tent pole holding up the cable business. Americans were football crazy and they would pay the price to have their weekend games. Now, ESPN dropping the NFL is no longer a crazy idea. They are getting killed by cord cutting, but they are also paying huge money for professional sports. They are preparing for another round of layoffs. There is a limit to cost cutting. Anyone involved in downsizing knows it is just a way to buy time.
The question no one seems to ask is why has the NFL lost its appeal? Again, the decline has been going on for a few years. Ratings were dropping before the players decided to demonstrate their hatred for white people. If we could get an honest accounting of ticket sales, my bet is those have been in decline as well. People in the secondary market say prices have been dropping for years, which is a good indication that retail sales were sliding too. For some reason, normies in America are losing interest in football.
One possible explanation is that supply created a bubble of demand. We tend to think of economic bubbles as demand driven, but take a look at the bookstore business. There was a time when the bookstore was the small shop selling bestsellers at the mall or a shop in the bohemian section of town. Then all of a sudden, every town had a massive warehouse selling books. Of course, Amazon came along too. Book sales went up until people remembered they did not like reading that much. Poof. Bookstores went away.
Maybe something similar is happening with sports. In the 70’s, it was rare for a sporting event to sell out. Big games were a hard ticket, but even some title games failed to sell out. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, the NBA playoffs were on tape delay. The famous US hockey win over the Soviets was not broadcast live. In the 80’s, new arenas and the roll out of cable made everyone a sports fan. Then the girls got into it and being a sports nut became the way people related to one another in the public.
It could be that after a generation of sports mania, people are remembering that watching live sports is not all that much fun. Just as the culture changed with the new flood of sports television and high end sports arenas, the culture is changing again as the novelty of those things wear off and people rediscover other entertainments. We tend to think of fads lasting a week or maybe a summer, but maybe some things run their course over a generation. Maybe as the Boomers fade, their cultural items are fading too.
If you think about it, Boomers have driven other sports fads that have come and gone. In my youth, tennis was a big deal. Boomers were young enough to play tennis, so they watched tennis too. Then the boomers got old and moved onto golf. Tennis collapsed and golf took off. Now, Boomers are getting too old for golf, so it has fallen into decline. Maybe that’s what is happening with professional sports like the NFL. The demographic cohort that blew the sports bubble is expiring and the bubble is collapsing.
It’s not an elegant answer, but there is no obvious reason why football has a stink on it all of a sudden. The games have been over-hyped circuses for a long time. They actually made some changes to quicken the pace and shorten the games. The cost of attendance is ridiculous, but you never hear that as an explanation for the sudden decline. Even so, that would not explain the free fall in TV ratings. Whatever the cause, it is part of a much longer trend and not the result of one thing, like the player protests.
Why has the NFL lost appeal?
I don’t watch sports, but I have a theory: How much of that crap can one person watch? What is the value? (not to be existential about it). Then they have these bozo’s on ESPN that just bullshit about the game.
This is probably the most over hyped event out there. Selling ‘authentic’ NFL sweat shirts for $200 (made in China). The moron legislature in Minnesota, voted to build a $billion+$ stadium for the Vikings.
The teams are mostly comprised of tattooed, low IQ Negroes, right out of the ghetto.
I just don’t get it.
I guess I would add that sports has become inflected with politics, like every aspect in our public lives. I assume SJWs do not like aggressive sports such as hockey or football, conservatives can’t stand dumb@ss players, sports media commentators, and alike voicing liberal BS.
I wrote one of my senators asking his stance on taxing the NFL, his staffs’ reply included the race card saying I should find common ground. I sent a note back stating I have nothing in common with a NFL player/employee on TV in front of millions of viewers, has an average salary of $2.4 million per year, acts like a dog urinating, and calls me a racist.
Screw the NFL.
Nothing but a bunch of rich spoiled brats.
substitute brats to thugs
The problem is inflation. When too much money is printed, the currency itself loses value. When too many options for entertainment of all kinds are available, the value of any one event is devalued.
We are overwhelmed with too much of everything: entertainments, news and information, clothing, food, taxes, and infinite choices in every realm of our existence. The complexities are driving us nuts and we are too distracted to find the energy for devotion to former idols like the NFL.
1) People want to see themselves, victory by proxy. When they look out on that field they do not see that.
2) Most people are decent, good, honorable to a degree. The NFL is venal, shallow, puffed up, egotistical posturing and profane.
3) You can only bleed a pig so much before it expires.
4) The owners and players are so far out of touch with the people they cannot fathom what goes on in their minds or hearts and have no clue as to what is important to them.
5) Most people go along with totalitarian policies because they don’t have a choice. They have a choice in this case. Football isn’t yet a human right that the Supreme Court dictates we must pay for- yet.
“People want to see themselves” BINGO. There are no players in the NFL (forget the NBA) that I can identify with. Moreover, there are no behaviors I can identify with.
I have lived in Minnesota for 37 years, but I’m not a Minnesotan.
The people in Minnesota have an inferiority complex. The state is run by Democrats, thus we spent tons of money on sports facilities: Twins stadium ( $560,000,000+), Vikings ($1,200,000,000), Timber Wolves (must be $350,000 newly remodeled). Then there is the MN Wild hockey team, they are building a stadium for a soccer team (MN United), we have a Lesbo basketball team. We have the St Paul Saints – a professional baseball team. Then there is the University of MN – brand new football stadium, and a brand new hockey arena.
The only thing I think we are missing is Gladiator matches.
All this for 3,000,000 people ( that’s counting a very wide area).
I don’t attend / watch / follow any of it.
HSF…you ledft out one thing. We are constantly told by the BLM type crowd that there is a complete breakdown of society due to racism.
A person of color can’t get ahead because of that fact. Yet when we mention that advancement should be through merit alone we are chastised for those statements.
Folks of color lament that they should be represented in society based on at least on their percentage of the population. When you agree, that it should apply to sports as well and that the NFL etc should be at least 65% white…then they start having convulsions .
It’s a tax. Which is to say a pox.
Subsidized. Bread\circuses boondoggle.
It never had any appeal – except to those who steal (& are indifferent to their complicity in criminal enterprise). Merely yet another segment of “society” ripping off “the commons” for their own diversion & entertainment.
“Are you not entertained?” No. & yes. Folly & infinite jest do have a funny side.
Before the phoners there were the ballers – same mesmerized, addicted seatwarmers. Ballers prolly watch breaded circus cutlets on their phones now. Either cage, or both combined – you’re the veal…cannibalistic veal…prion infected veal.
I used to watch maybe 2-3 games a year, and usually would watch the superbowl. Although the superbowl was really just an event, excuse to visit with friends en masse and socialize and eat tons of junk food. I never got the tribalistic nature that many of my friends showed, how much of their own ego fulfillment seemed tied into “their team”. Mind you none of my friends teams are even in cities that they have ever lived. I was one of the only one’s out of my peer group that even played football. My friends are mostly Rep’s types or just completely apathetic to politics. The tribalistic friends still watch the NFL despite being turned off by the anthem protests. Honestly, I think its just an excuse to sit around and get drunk, its like pavlovian conditioning with them.
There is a nearly endless list of thing wrong with the world today, yet despite that, we have more versions of entertainment than we could easily list. Most of us have shelter, electricity, plenty of food, we are so far removed from the “needs” that we have turned trivial things into “needs”. I just don’t think the human condition works well with this new version of reality, clearly the disintigration of health due to chronic sedentary modernity are prime examples of this. Too much free time to stare at screens and become veyouirs of other people’s lives. Sports have shown themselves to be much like Hollywood a place of social decay, but they act like the pharisees of old yelling from their bullypulpits at the peasants and how we should bow down to their superior knowledge. I don’t even go to superbowl parties anymore, we just play board games as a family now adays. Yelling at the screen about “my team” just irritates me, I have no desire to be in the room with that type of behavior anymore. Time is the real coin of life, maybe I’m just more aware of it now that I’m no longer a spring chicken. Hopefully the NFL and Holllywood both implode, but its hard to imagine at this point. The band likely will play on, until the icy waters finally fill up the ship.
Niggers and then the Jew owners of the teams that are encouraging them to behave like this. Black Niggers Destory everything they touch and the Jews use them as biological weapons against white Christian society which most Wealthy Jews hate with a passion.That in a nutshell is what’s wrong with the NFL!!!!!
BB used to be the village idiot. Now he has become a philosopher in touch with reality.
NFL ? I don’t know and don’t care.
Anyway, getting back to the reasons the NFL maybe losing its fans…..Here are a dozen.
1. Players celebrating a tackle (or good hit) like they just won the Super Bowl even when their team is down 17 points with 3 minutes to go. Basically, too much stupid on display.
2. Every single pass play is met with players chiding the Refs for a call.
3. No respect between players. Too much yapping. No class.
4. Referee calls are inconsistent at best.
5. Dropped passes.
6. Where are the great QBs?
7. Announcers are simply annoying.
8. Sideline reporters…”I talked to the coach and he said…” Channel change.
9. Commercials, commercials, commercials.
10. Politics.
11. Criminal records.
12. Drama not related to the game. KapperDick.
The product sucks. I’m a boomer. I yearn for the days when good plays were made and players just went back to the huddle without fanfare.
Never could understand people wanting to watch grown men chase and carry a ball around. Who gives a fuck. Would rather watch someone take a shit, at least it wouldn’t take as long.
Dio………..
Would you be holding an oil lamp while looking for someone that is taking a dump?
You wait and see, they’ll come back with what people want to see. Some sort of brutal shit where somebody gets hurt bad for all to see. Russia had a show not long ago with a damn serious ‘Hunger games’ bent to it. I ‘ll bet it involves prisoners in for whatever reason – just my guess. The show must go on.
How about putting antifa members and Trump supporters in a ring without weapons and let them have at it. I know where I would put my money.
Protesting against the flag just because you can makes about as much sense as stabbing your life raft because you can or cutting the cords on your parachute because you can or jumping into a shark tank at the zoo because you can. But what do you expect from a bunch of idiots running around chasing a lopsided ball like a dog, with their IQ and name emblazened on their outfit? Yea, I said outfit. With the ratings in the crapper and their half time entertainment pure sh.t, why don’t they rename the superbowl folly for what it is? The Toilet Bowl. End of rant. Jackasses. OK, now done.
I think the NFL and other sports are in a general decline because it’s all fake. It’s not about achievement or talent or even hard work. It’s about money. It’s about ratings. It’s about “them” hatching some new money grubbing ploy then forcefully finding a way to “sell” it to the sheople.
The only sport I ever really watched was Nascar. That was because I was a gearhead by nature and I was in to circle track racing in real life. Actually the part I liked the most was the tech, skill and creativity of maximizing horsepower. When I first started watching there were no restrictor plates to limit HP. Two hundred and fifty MPH was the next milestone but now there are no milestones to achieve except MOAR MONEY! Sponsors were Goodyear, gas & oil compaines, STP, Champion etc. Saddest day I ever saw in Nascar was a photo shoot at Darlington Speedway with Sterling Marlin for his new sponsor……..Underalls Pantyhose! Really? Women fucking hate pantyhose! Sure the babes were hot (I’m a leg man) but I was embarrassed for Sterling. I was embarrassed for the men who loved making horsepower and testing themselves and their machines against each other. That’s not what Nascar is about anymore.
Back when I started watching and even attending races many “teams” stayed in dive motels in the small towns surrounding the big tracks. They pulled the one car around on a little open air trailer just like the one I had. They even had a tire rack for lightly used tires. Tool boxes, jacks and other equipment were stuffed into the race cars or on the trailers anywhere they could be strapped down. The drivers and their friends (the teams) suffered for their craft. Drivers and “teams” had day jobs. Now it’s just a giant revenue generating machine trying to cater to every possible desire of every possible fan. It’s fake bullshit. I stopped watching in the early 90’s.
I could go on for days with all the shit I saw in that one sport but I have no doubt that other sports organizations became the same giant revenue generating machines. I’m actually surprised the sheople stuck with any of it for as long as they did. It was probably just the shallow, scared nature of sheople not wanting to be “left out” that kept them virtually enslaved to buying the tickets and merchandise which brings me to another, likely primary, reason the fans are bailing in droves………they are fucking broke! $100 plus tickets, $100 plus cable bills, $20 hats, $45 dollar shirts, $9 hot dogs with annual increases in prices and annual decreases in size/quality. All that in an era of people losing their homes, good paying jobs, being unable to afford basic healthcare etc., etc., etc. The circuses appear to be ending. I say good riddance to all of it. Maybe the sheople will wake to the coming reality of no more USA before our owners complete their task of destroying it.
“likely primary, reason the fans are bailing in droves………they are fucking broke! $100 plus tickets, $100 plus cable bills, $20 hats, $45 dollar shirts, $9 hot dogs with annual increases in prices and annual decreases in size/quality. All that in an era of people losing their homes, good paying jobs, being unable to afford basic healthcare etc., etc., etc. The circuses appear to be ending. I say good riddance to all of it. Maybe the sheople will wake to the coming reality of no more USA before our owners complete their task of destroying it.”
BINGO !!!!
Too MANY players named Washington, Jackson, Brown, etc.
Not ENOUGH players named Bronko Nagurski, Ditka, Butkus, etc.
(see what I did there?)
Social Injustice
I think Tinbuk 3 had it right in 1986. It’s the same as why Hollywood is dying. It’s the times. The party’s over.