I’m saying that the popularity of the NFL and college ball helps drive the popularity of high school ball, and vice versa.
But what makes it popular in the first place?
Julie
Well, it wouldn’t have been popular in the first place if it wasn’t fun.
What part of Ohio do you live in, jsgoddess? You’re aware, arent you, that a vast percentage of your neighbors are football fans.
Do you go to games much yourself?
Isn’t one of the defining characteristics of a top athlete the ability to handle the pressure of big moments? (I was rooting for uruguay too by the way)
The plain fact is that teams like Spain and Italy laid it on the line and got BEAT. That’s it, no crying.
-Which is the real beauty of 'MRICAN Football. Any given day, any given team can win (except the cowboys lately).
-And the frequent stoppages make for good tv
-And it’s a miniature war complete with heroes, small victories, battles, etc.
-And it’s our most blue collar sport
-and it’s a weekly event, so you don’t have to follow your team more than once a week, minimal investment, max return.
That sort of dodges the question. Why is football considered “more fun” and is therefore more popular than the other sports? What qualities make football so popular? It can’t just be that the game is played at the high school, college and professional levels, because the other major sports are played at those levels, too.
Another example of bizarre racial profiling. According to Wiley, there were only three “African-American starters” in the All-Star game; Garret Anderson, Barry Bonds, and Gary Sheffield. So apparently Carlos Delgado, who is black and is an American citizen, is not an African-American, because he speaks Spanish.
Yes, that’s Wiley’s world; African-Americans are black people who speak English. Black Americans who speak Spanish are some other weird bizarro-world race.
But then he takes it back and admits that, well, actuall, of 18 All-Star game starters, EIGHT WERE BLACK. 44%, a pretty high figure. So he says he’s going to decry the lack of black people who were born in the United States. (Evidently in Wiley World, Puerto Rico isn’t an American territory.) So, apparently, baseball teams are racist because they are employing black men from other countries.
Then of course, the classic line:
Bill James, of course, is the same guy who says Rickey Henderson is the greatest leadoff man ever, is underrated, and had a career equal to two Hall of Fame careers.
This is common muckraking. Recently the Toronto Star’s Richard Griffin, widely considered among the worst baseball writers in the BBWAA, said the Blue Jays were racist and would never have wanted a player like Jackie Robinson because Robinson didn’t fit the Jays’ mould of patient hitters and couldn’t thrive in a game that didn’t steal a lot of bases. Yes, Jackie Robinson, who thrived in the time when fewer bases were stolen than at any other time in baseball history, who took 80-100 walks every year and was the smartest, most patient hitter in the National League. There was NOTHING about Jackie Robinson the “Statheads” wouldn’t like - tremendous plate discipline, some power, didn’t attempt too many steals, great defence, the works. He was even a college ballplayer, another stathead love. (The new wave of thinking is that you shouldn’t draft kids out of high school.) He was one of the smartest, most disciplined ballplayers to ever wear a uniform.
You got the honest sense that Griffin did not actually know anything about Jackie Robinson except that he was black, and that he assumed because Robinson was black that he was an undisciplined ballplayer.
If you listen to George Carlin’s take on the diffeances between baseball and football you will understand the why football is as big as it is.
He nails the atraction of both sports.
No other explaination is needed.
He take on who the quarter back is and the roll he plays in a game is spot on ~
Yeah, one thing I have always liked about the NFL as compared to MLB and NBA is the team names and jerseys.With the exception of the overlapping St. Louis/Pheonix Cardinals and a few others, the NFL just has way cooler names and jerseys(Raiders vs. Bears or somesuch just sounds more interesting than The Twins vs. The Cubs ;D).The short lived XFL actually did one better with the names and jerseys they had(too bad they did not have some talent filling those jerseys:( ).
No, I don’t go to games. Despite being a Notre Dame grad and living in Buckeye country, I don’t like football, or college sports in general.
The question in this thread is “why is football so popular.”
Your answer seems to be: “Because so many people like it.”
As you can see, I’m sure, that’s a pretty frustrating answer!
Julie
As you can see, I had ideas on continuing popularity. I don’t know much about what the roots of the popularity of the game were.
Sorry if you don’t like my answer, but if I knew it all, I wouldn’t be hanging around here much.
jsgoddess: I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here, but I’m guessing you get the Bengals every week; not the Browns. In Cinncinnati and its surrounding areas, there is no reason why Football is good or should be watched. (Although I’m honestly rooting for Marvin Lewis, they will be lucky to go 6-10.)
However, for the rest of the 31 teams, Football still rules the roost. Here’s some specific reasons why I think Football is so popular, as opposed to why I think it’s the greatest game:
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Gambling. There is no other sport that is so well-suited to gambling. In fact, no other sport comes even close. March Madness would be the closest competitor, and I would argue that the Superbowl alone sees more action than all the pools added together. (And each week in the NFL is its own March Madness. For example, does your office have a pool?)
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Absence makes the heart grow fonder. 8 months a year of no football prevents overload. 1 game a week makes each game as important as a post-season game in any other sport.
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Military design. There are myriad correlations between football and the military. Tactics, strategies, leadership/chain-of-command, teamwork, and specialization are all broad categories where many direct correlations can be made. And for the average guy, all of these subjects are innately interesting.
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The quality of the product. If you didn’t follow the NFL last year, you missed out. Virtually every week, the 90 minute ESPN NFL wrapup on Sunday night began with the anchors shaking their heads and saying: “So many great games, so much great talent, it’s easy to see why football is so popular. Week after week, the quality of the NFL’s product is simply amazing.” And they weren’t just blowing smoke.
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Parity. Every single football fan in the US (except in Cinncinnati) has legitimate reason to be optimistic. Last year, 14 of the 16 teams in the AFC had a chance to make the playoffs with only 2 weeks to go in the season. That’s staggering when you consider that there are only 6 available slots.
There’s many other reasons. These are just my top five.
I pretty much agree with your list except for number 3. I’ve never heard anyone comment on that aspect of the game. Violence should be on there (mmmmm…violence) and NFL Films/NFL marketing. I do have one nitpick though.
I don’t think this is it, since such serious parity is a really recent phenomenon in the NFL, and and people have only really started talking about it in the past few years when the Rams came out of nowhere to win it. It has been something the NFL has been working towards, though.
Interestingly, since 1967 (the year of the first Super Bowl) exactly 17 different NFL teams have won the Super Bowl. In that same time span, exactly 17 different franchises have won the World Series - and that’s with one season taken off due to abject stupidity. And it could be bumped up to 18 as long as Seattle, Boston, Houston, ChiSox, San Francisco, or the Cubbies win it this year (those are the teams still in serious contention for the post-season).
Ellis Dee, I don’t really think ANY of your reasons are correct.
The NFL is as popular as it is for the same reason Coke is as popular as it is; marketing. Football is not intrinsically, a better sport in terms of watching it, playing it, or betting on it. The quality of talent in the NFL is high? The quality of talent in baseball and basketball has never been better. The NFL, as already demonstrated, doesn’t really have any more parity than baseball (although it has a reputation for parity baseball doesn’t - but that’s marketing, not reality.) All sports have “tactics” and “strategy.” And frankly, the reason football is popular for gambling is because of its general poularity.
The NFL is insanely popular because it is the best-marketed pro sport in the history of pro sports. I don’t mean the best marketed right now, or the best marketed pro sport in the USA; it’s the best marketed pro sport ever, in any country. Pete Rozelle was a genius and the NFL has invented ways of selling their product decades before anyone else thought of them. Major League Baseball was way, way behind on the marketing and PR curve at exactly the same time the NFL was inventing new ways to market itself. Most significantly, the NFL embraced television and changed their sport to suit it, whereas MLB still broadcasts their games with great reluctance. The NFL has NFL Films; baseball has, well, no equivalent organization.
The simple fact is this; during the NFL season I can, with very little effort, see any NFL game I want on a regular cable or satellite package. I know that the games will all be on at either 1:00 or 4:00 (I’m in the Eastern time zone.) I can’t do that with baseball (or hockey or basketball) - there’s no one place to get the games, and no one time they’re on. I can’t even watch all my home team’s games on the same channel, because they’ve sold blocks of them to different stations. The NFL sells its game to TV as a league; MLB still insists on piecemealing the games out team-by-team.
Neurotik was absolutely right. In this case there really is a simple and straightforward answer. The NFL is not a better-run league or a better sport. It’s the best marketed sport ever. The popularity of football as opposed to baseball exactly matches the NFL’s marketing efforts, beginning under Rozelle. Not a coincidence.
I honestly don’t know who they play now, but I would suspect the Browns. They played the Browns up until the Art Modell fiasco–which is when I completely abandoned football. And we always get the Indians (yay!) instead of the Reds (much smaller yay).
But since I no longer watch it, I don’t know what team is considered “local.”
Julie
According to this site, there are currently 17 Canadians in the NFL.
Secondly, Canadians are every bit the football fans that Americans are, going back 130 years. In fact, according to this
cite , the first organized football league in North America was formed in Ontario back in 1883.
You should watch the history channel’s “cola wars” to get a better idea of why Coke is so popular. Marketing is a large factor, but not the only one. (The fact that Coke is quite tasty plays a role, for instance.)
Football and basketball are intrinsically better for gambling. No other sport makes betting anywhere near the 50-50 proposition that they do.
In what way was the sport changed to suit television?
“Hockey Night in Canada.” Tune to ESPN or ESPN2 and you’ll see Hockey all night every Tuesday and Saturday. On both channels. Sadly, the contract runs out in a year or two to make room for Basketball, but I believe TNT or TBS will pick up “Hockey Night” after that.
The NFL marketing efforts are excellent. I don’t disagree. But marketing doesn’t negate the importance of product. Hollywood has proven that you can “buy” an opening weekend box-office with marketing, but a bad movie will tank after that no matter how much you promote. The reason the NFL hasn’t tanked is because the quality of the product is so high, coupled with the fact that it is unusually well-suited for gambling.