'Sorry, NFL: Baseball Is Still America's Pastime'

NFL fans seldom, if ever, go to the games?

Every game is sold out.

Parking lots are filled with tailgaters.

 

It's a matter of inventory. NFL teams have 10 games (eight plus two exhibitions) to sell. Baseball teams have 81. So given the huge NFL TV audience, most of them don't go to games. They can't. It's a nobody goes there it's too crowded situation.

 

With 10 home games (including the pre-season), many tickets are held by season ticket holders who attend nearly every game.

When the season ticket holder can't go, they pass along their tickets to a small circle of friends and family members.

Corporate tickets too are distributed to a small circle of people.

 

I honestly don't know, but I'm not the one who wrote an article about it. My point is that the particular quote passes off an old, biased estimate as if it is some kind of useful fact.

 

NFL attendance has been on a steady decline for at least the last six years, while baseball has been going up.

 

This is America's pastime:




You'll see a lot of this at both baseball AND football games, instead of watching the game.

 

Oh, absolutely they do. I guess I don't know about "vast majority," but I would bet the percentage of baseball fans who attend one game per season is 5x-10x the percentage of football fans.

Football sucks in the stadium. The NFL knows this. That's why they're designing all the new stadiums to be "like watching the game at home." Thanks, but I'll skip the $500 and just have the real home with my own refrigerator and toilet.

 

And funerals.

 

As noted, it has far less to do with the experience and far more to do with the scarcity of NFL game tickets compared to MLB tickets. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of NFL fans would happily snap up tickets if you offered them for the price of the least expensive baseball ticket in their market and would be thrilled to go to a game.

 

Assuming that people fall into clearly demarcated camps -- e.g., primarily NFL fans and primarily MLB fans -- I would be very surprised if the proportion of MLBers who've attended at least one MLB game (we won't even consider MiLB games) doesn't dwarf the proportion of NFLers who've been to a game. The arithmetic -- there are close to 10 times as many MLB games per year as there are NFL games -- is just too compelling.

But then again, I don't know that those proportions would tell us much, if anything, about the relative popularity of those two sports.

 

Ticket scarcity is part of it. But so is the fact that it is just really easy to be a casual football fan. Much easier than it is to be a casual baseball fan. They only play once a week, of course. Typically on the one day most people have off of work. And the fact that there are only 16 games makes every game matter more - and it also, not insignificantly, makes it easier to understand why any particular game matters.

Football is complex, of course. But, personnel-wise, there's no equivalent of the pitching staff. To your average casual sports fan, it's like trying to keep track of the characters on "Boardwalk Empire." It makes baseball interesting, but it also makes it a chore. The most important person on the field changes every game. Sometimes every inning. Sometimes every out. And I understand that there are 22 football players, and that's just in base packages. And that personnel groupings come in and out of games. But fans consider this so important that the networks show everything but the personnel changes before and after plays. People just don't care. They care about the quarterback and the running back and a couple of receivers. And they find that adequate.

Most importantly, football is easy to gamble on, which is a huge driver of its popularity. Maybe the biggest.