From a September 18 post at Facebook that I thought readers of MFBTS who are not on my FB page may find interesting or hopefully amusing at least...No links other than the original article that set me off to thinking is necessary, I don't think:
Football is a losing economic proposition for cities in my view because it is only eight games and maybe a playoff game. That's it. For cities to bestow billions in taxpayer money, credits or guarantees to billionaire owners of these teams strikes me as the worst form of socialism. The people of San Diego were so correct in letting the Spano family take their team elsewhere.
The decline in ratings in the NFL is only partly explained, in my gut sense, by the scandals of concussions and off field activities or even on field kneelings by certain players. It is more that I do not see young people choosing the NFL when they have so many other entertainment choices. I personally found myself watching the Green Bay-Atlanta game at a restaurant last night and I realized I still have an emotional tie to watching NFL football. As I said to The Wife, football is a far more complicated game than people think, and the players have to be much more intelligent than people give credit for in individual football players. Each team's playbook is a large, complicated document. The number of plays, the assignments and the strategies for and against the two sides that line up on each play are spelled out and players have to memorize the number signals for every single play and know their assignments. There are a multitude of plays that can be called and different numbers are codes. What one sees onscreen is often poetry in motion culminating in harsh collisions all across the field on every single play.
The Wife, however, remained unimpressed. :)
My children will watch a basketball game on television. They will not watch a baseball game except in person or the playoffs. They have no interest in football. They see it as a sport where the violent quotient outweighs the entertainment quotient. I don't know if that is indicative of the younger folks, quite honestly. But the decline in ratings may portend something longer term for football as a sport, and Goodell the NFL Commissioner seems ill-equipped to lead the other owners in that recognition and response. Perhaps the NFL needs a new economic oriented playbook...For the past decade, I have predicted that by 2030 we may only watch football on computer screens without people or live with robots. I know it's silly, but at least it speaks to the concussion issue that has arisen....
Oh well. It's just the start of the 2017 season...
