NFL Viewership Is Down...Hmm, Why Ever Could That Be?
People like to talk about bubbles. Bubbles - as in unsustainably excessive prosperity - are fun to assess and diagnose. Glenn Reynolds writes and talks alot about the Higher Education Bubble. I think he's right.
An area where I have been writing about that I believe is clearly a bubble is professional sports. But I've struggled with identifying how the bubble would burst. Bad behavior? Nope. We've got all kinds of boorish behavior on the part of athletes and we keep on handing over our dollars to the sports industry by tuning in and buying merchandise. I suspected it would be a good old-fashioned recession that would bring the sports bubble crashing down - who's gonna buy their kid another $170 jersey when you can't make the mortgage or car payment? Well, we had a recession recently and the economy isn't racing along by any stretch but it seems the sports bubble continues to inflate.
Are there signs that air might be coming out of the sports bubble? I don't know but there is, at least, some reporting on it. Although, this one is a curious animal (OK, not really). Bloomberg News chronicles a surprising and rather sharp fall off in NFL viewership, and attempts to pinpoint the source. Funny, in all those words they fail to mention the name "Kaepernick" or mention the dalliance that many players and teams had with that doofus's National Anthem protests. I haven't watch a single NFL game this year over this Kaepernick garbage and I know several others who feel the same way, and I think this sentiment is widespread.
Is this a case of a liberal news organization missing a key cause and affect relationship because the notion would be completely outside of their worldview? Maybe. I doubt a typical Bloomberg News reporter could fathom not watching the NFL because of these protests.
Who knows what is going on, but here is a thought - the NFL is VERY important to the media and the NFL, from the top on down to the players, realized that this was headed down the wrong road and have moved to put a stop to it...quietly. Everybody involved knows where their bread is butter and they have made a decision to stop shitting where they eat. So the less said about Kaepernick and Co. the better and better to play dumb about why people are tuning out rather than remind them why they are tuning out.
An area where I have been writing about that I believe is clearly a bubble is professional sports. But I've struggled with identifying how the bubble would burst. Bad behavior? Nope. We've got all kinds of boorish behavior on the part of athletes and we keep on handing over our dollars to the sports industry by tuning in and buying merchandise. I suspected it would be a good old-fashioned recession that would bring the sports bubble crashing down - who's gonna buy their kid another $170 jersey when you can't make the mortgage or car payment? Well, we had a recession recently and the economy isn't racing along by any stretch but it seems the sports bubble continues to inflate.
Are there signs that air might be coming out of the sports bubble? I don't know but there is, at least, some reporting on it. Although, this one is a curious animal (OK, not really). Bloomberg News chronicles a surprising and rather sharp fall off in NFL viewership, and attempts to pinpoint the source. Funny, in all those words they fail to mention the name "Kaepernick" or mention the dalliance that many players and teams had with that doofus's National Anthem protests. I haven't watch a single NFL game this year over this Kaepernick garbage and I know several others who feel the same way, and I think this sentiment is widespread.
Is this a case of a liberal news organization missing a key cause and affect relationship because the notion would be completely outside of their worldview? Maybe. I doubt a typical Bloomberg News reporter could fathom not watching the NFL because of these protests.
Who knows what is going on, but here is a thought - the NFL is VERY important to the media and the NFL, from the top on down to the players, realized that this was headed down the wrong road and have moved to put a stop to it...quietly. Everybody involved knows where their bread is butter and they have made a decision to stop shitting where they eat. So the less said about Kaepernick and Co. the better and better to play dumb about why people are tuning out rather than remind them why they are tuning out.
posted by Donny Baseball at 2:58 PM
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