OldTimeAFLGuy Posted July 18, 2018 Posted July 18, 2018 50 minutes ago, Tcali said: exactly I like the old westerns! ...LOL..."The Rifleman"...."Gunsmoke"......"Bonanza".........good stuff...........
bobobonators Posted July 18, 2018 Posted July 18, 2018 4 hours ago, RoyBatty is alive said: Sports ebb and flow with popularity, to think football is magically immune is shortsighted at best. Remember when Baseball wa always going to be Amrica's Sport, what happened there? In the 1930s the three dominant sports were Horse Racing, Boxing and Baseball? Where is horse racing and boxing today? Attendance last year league overall was down half a million, Super Bowls adds adjusted for inflation went down. Not conjecture, facts. There is an entire litany of potential problems facing the NFL. 1) CTE 2) Technology threats to TV revenue source 3) Product itself: too many penalties, too many arbitrary calls and questionable officiating, what exactly is a catch, etc etc etc. It is a QB driven league, you dont have a top tier QB odds of success are incredibly diminish. I cut back watching for all these reasons. 4) The entire kneeling anthem thing, it has alienated some to think otherwise is either political agenda drive or just downright foolish. 5) Over saturation driven by greed. Thursday nights games are terrible, some Sundays you can watch NFL from about 9am til 10 pm. 6) Attended football games is getting excessively expensive and fan behavior is an issue. Oh yeah there are some real isues here. Several of your “concerns” are blown out of the water by the very fact that the NFL keeps increasing their revenue. At what point are your concerns irrelevant? Fact: Boxing never had a cultural connection to the US. Fact: Horseracing is a fringe sport that is impossible for the masses to participate in or relate to. Fact: Baseball has had a cultural connection to this country for a century, and theres a reason why its still extremely relevant today. Some of the other conerns you express apply to ALL sports, not just football. Its expensive to attend any professional league game. The NFL still has the least amount of games of any of the big 3 sports, and its not even close. The anthem thing is nothing more than a blip on the radar; a knat on an elephants ass. And revenue numbers contradict your concern. Which sport doesnt have product concerns? Baseball is like water torture at times. The final few minutes of any basketball game take over half an hour with all the timeouts. Flopping in soccer. Etc. Technology threats? You lost me. CTE: we live in a country that is among the most violent in the planet; we romanticize war; we love MMA; we love guns; we love violence. We’ve always known (even if only anecdotally) that bashing your head for a living couldnt be good for you, yet here we still are today. On the flipside: athletes get paid well for their services and sacrifices. 1
GunnerBill Posted July 19, 2018 Posted July 19, 2018 14 hours ago, RoyBatty is alive said: Sports ebb and flow with popularity, to think football is magically immune is shortsighted at best. Remember when Baseball wa always going to be Amrica's Sport, what happened there? In the 1930s the three dominant sports were Horse Racing, Boxing and Baseball? Where is horse racing and boxing today? Attendance last year league overall was down half a million, Super Bowls adds adjusted for inflation went down. Not conjecture, facts. There is an entire litany of potential problems facing the NFL. 1) CTE 2) Technology threats to TV revenue source 3) Product itself: too many penalties, too many arbitrary calls and questionable officiating, what exactly is a catch, etc etc etc. It is a QB driven league, you dont have a top tier QB odds of success are incredibly diminish. I cut back watching for all these reasons. 4) The entire kneeling anthem thing, it has alienated some to think otherwise is either political agenda drive or just downright foolish. 5) Over saturation driven by greed. Thursday nights games are terrible, some Sundays you can watch NFL from about 9am til 10 pm. 6) Attended football games is getting excessively expensive and fan behavior is an issue. Oh yeah there are some real isues here. 1 - CTE - this is a serious issue and a serious long term concern for the league. Witness its endless campaigns about making youth football safer and the rule changes to make the league itself safer. However, I think it only becomes a commercial concern if it results in the most talented athletes choosing not to play the game and to play other sports. Only then could it seriously hurt the product in a way that hits the bottom line. There is no evidence at this stage that we are even close to this point. 2 - Technology is an opportunity for the NFL not a threat to it. It has streamed games on Amazon, it has streamed games on twitter, it has Game Pass as an established product worldwide.... if and when the time comes when the Networks are no longer the cash cow that keeps providing (long way off as has been demonstrated NFL tv viewing figures are UP relative to other product even if TV viewing overall is down) then the NFL has already got plenty of options for continuing to maximise broadcast revenues. 3 - Lots of old school NFL fans think the product has declined but there is no evidence that is a shared view. People are still watching more that they watch anything else. Thursday Night Football games have outranked World Series games. Even what you consider a watered down NFL is the biggest show in town and by an ever increasing margin. 4 - The anthem protests have alienated some. But despite all the grandstanding from Trump and others a lot of those who hate the kneeling are still watching the games. Until a large enough number vote with their remote this is a total non-issue. The NFL cares about it... but it cares about it because of the optics of being dragged into a row with the President. At the moment it is having zero effect on revenues. 5 - The new TNF deal is up by a third. And that is for the product many think is "terrible". The fact that the NFL has relaxed the "every team must have a TNF game" rule tells me one thing.... the experiment era of TNF is over. It is here to stay. And it is bringing home the bacon in terms of increased TV revenues. 6 - I agree tickets are too expensive. I think that is something the league will need to look at. But the days when ticket revenue was the lifeblood of the NFL from an income perspective are long, long gone. When it can become an issue that hits the bottom line is when it is prohibitive for younger people to go to the extent that their interest in the game drifts and they are no longer consumers of broadcast games. Don't think we are close to that yet but this is an issue with the potential to hurt in the much longer term.
The Process Posted July 19, 2018 Posted July 19, 2018 On 7/17/2018 at 10:59 AM, Mr. WEO said: Many still struggle to understand this. Networks will always pay top dollar for the best product on TV. The NFL is a guaranteed bringer of top ad money for the networks. Even more impressive is record revenue amidst the plethora of advertising options increased by social media etc.
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