This is an offshoot of an offshoot thread inspired by this post by Omniscient.
I’m a transplant to the south from the Great Lakes area. I grew up in Cleveland and Buffalo, two cities that lived and died by the fortunes of their football teams. Summers in Cleveland were essentially one gigantic city-wide conversation about the failings of the Tribe. Buffalo winters and springs were a monocultured obsession with the Sabres. College sports were entirely nonexistent, partly because of the lack of major universities in those areas, but from my experience with people in areas where there were both pro and college options (Boston, for instance) professional sports ruled supreme unless you had a distinct connection with a university or college.
In North Carolina (and from what I’ve seen, in Florida and Georgia, as well), the presence of professional teams really is just an adjunct to college sports. None of the pro sports teams around here seem to have the same support that teams in other areas around the country do. Does anyone have any insight as to why the south wouldn’t support teams placed here.
This is a list of pro teams in what I and I think most of the country considers ‘the South’, including Florida as a southern state, but not including Texas, which is its own animal.
Carolina Panthers
Carolian Hurricanes
Charlotte Bobcats
Atlanta Falcons
Atlanta Braves
Altanta Hawks
Atlanta Thrashers
Tampa Bay Buccanneers
Tampa Bay Devil Rays
Tampa Bay Lightning
Jacksonville Jaguars
Florida Marlins
Florida Panthers
Miami Dolphins
New Orleans Hornets
New Orleans Saints
Tennessee Titans
Nashville Predators
Memphis Grizzlies
Of all these teams, I think it’s fair to say that the Miami Dolphins have been generally regarded as a success story in it’s particular league. The Braves, the (Carolina) Panthers and the Hurricanes are probably the next most successful franchises… but even they have a lot of problems with attendence and general community support.
All of the other franchises seem to be perennially concerned with increasing fan attendence, preventing disgruntled owners from moving them, or even from considerations for league contraction.
The same phenomenon you mention holds pretty true in Texas as well, although it seems to be more dependent on whether you went to college or not.
Non-college attendees tend to be bigger into the pro sports, while people who went to a college, or to some extent, even only really wanted to go to the college will follow that school’s football team and/or basketball team avidly. Pro football is something that’s on the TV on Sundays and Mondays, but it’s definitely second-fiddle to Saturday football.
Basketball is hard to tell, mostly because I don’t really follow any basketball until the beginning of March, and barely keep up with the pro teams at all.
Baseball is something that’s pretty well pro-oriented though. Unless you’re a rabid college fan, most baseball fans are pro fans down here- Astros or Rangers for obvious reasons. College baseball isn’t shown on TV at all, which is probably a big factor in its lack of popularity.
Not in the context of fan support. A few years back – when they were still good – they were unable to sell out a home playoff game. It was really quite pathetic and sad.
The Titans are pretty popular in and around Nashville, especially for being so recent on the scene. I grant you however that Titans fandom is but a slender shade compared to the utter lunacy that is UT fandom. It’s truly bizarre.
One theory put up about lack of fan support for the Rays or the Braves (unless they are in first place) is that the South is full of People Who Weren’t Born There and thus have childhood attachments to other teams other than the hometown team. But that should also hold true for Arizona, but the Diamondbacks and Suns are both very well supported. I’ll disregard the Arizona Cardinals are a special case of non-support because the ownership is so dysfunctional on an almost historic level.
When the Panthers made it to the Super Bowl a few years ago, suddenly everyone was a Major Panther Fan. Everyone outdid themselves about how much longer they’ve supported the Panthers. Then they got trashed and are now terrible, so they barely get news time.
Same with the Hurricanes. First time in NC history that one of our pro teams won a national championship and suddenly everyone was The Biggest Fan Ever To Exist. Now, you may see some logos here or there, but nothing significant.
You’re in Durham, so you know how this is. North Carolina is about what color blue you wear, whether or not you think Dean is a god, people who support State or Wake just to be contrary, etc.
Atlanta is the same way. Atlanta… Falcons? We have a football team? What about Georgia (GO DAWGS) and Tech (GO JACKETS)?
I think one reason why, on the whole, pro sports aren’t as popular as college sports in the South is because college sports have had more time to develop their fan bases and rivalries. The NFL, the NBA, and MLB didn’t have any franchises in the Deep South until the 1960’s. Contrast that with the Northeast and Midwest which, in the case of the NFL and MLB, have had teams since the earliest days of those leagues.
Part of the problem with my accepting that is the fact that I’m 25. I’m friends with people as young as 17, and despite the fact that southern teams were popping up around here around the same timeframe that I began learning about sports… they just care about college basketball. All of them!
Yes, I think this does play a substantial part in the equation. Sitting at a Rangers game at the Ballpark in Arlington, I’ve almost felt like a visitor due to the number of Red Sox fans in attendance. Same at Reliant when the Texans played Indy… a sea of blue and white. Many who came down here because of the thriving economy remain true to the out of state teams of their youth.
I have a hard time understanding why anyone would get emotionally attached to a pro team. Pro players are mercenaries. Except for free agents, they don’t choose their teams. They usually have no prior geographic connection to their teams.
A college player, on the other hand, is often from the state where the school is located. He is a hometown boy. If not, he has at least chosen to be there, so he shares the affection of the fans for that particular team.
So I’m going to turn it around on the OP: why would you get emotionally attached to a pro team?
“Our mercenaries are better than your mercenaries!”
The problem with some of the pro teams in North Carolina is the attitude the owners have that their shit doesn’t stink.
I remember when the Hurricanes moved down from Hartford. This was right after Hurricane Fran devastated the state, and there was a lot of head-scratching and asking of “Why would they call themselves that?” Talk about starting off on the wrong foot.
They also had no clue about the market they had moved into. I really think they looked at the transplants in Cary, and thought they had a built-in market. I still don’t think they’ve been able to convince the folks down east that they should watch hockey rather than college basketball.
I’m pretty sure the situation in Alabama is not the only reason that the South is less into pro sports than other areas like the Northeast and the West Coast, especially when you consider other rivalries like USC-UCLA and Michigan-Ohio State, but in Alabama for sure the bitterness of the rivalry between Auburn and Alabama has been going on since 1948 at least and in that state if you’re for one team you’re almost automatically against the other. The bottom line of that is that a pro football team trying to establish a fanbase in Alabama and surrounding states would have that issue to contend with. It hasn’t happened yet, even with some efforts to bridge the gap and unify the fans.
The Titans don’t face the same problem in Tennessee. Vandy fans can embrace the same team that the Vols do without as much hatred and bitterness. Besides, the quality of the UT program versus the one at Vandy leaves a lot to be desired in the heat of the in-state rivalry, so pulling for the Titans is a way of feeling some reward for the fandom.
But the SEC’s grip on football in this region is going to be a major obstacle to the pro football efforts of any place outside the larger metropolitan areas like Atlanta, New Orleans, and (to some extent) Nashville. Even Memphis, where the Titans were located for a season, wasn’t as keen on supporting a team as Nashville has turned out to be. It’s worth noting that even the Carolina and Tennessee teams are regional or state teams, and not city teams. Contrast that with Green Bay of all places. Counterparts like New England and Minnesota might be worth the comparison efforts, though.
The earlier comment about how it’s been only relatively recently, even for Atlanta, that pro football has been accepted in the South (as compared to the Northeast and Midwest) carries a lot of weight in the slow wooing of fans to support a team, especially financially. And I still don’t understand hockey’s fascination in an area where ice causes drivers to act crazy!
Given the baseball market established by minor-league franchises, I think baseball teams moving into these areas would have an easier time attracting local fans, especially considering the fact that unlike colleges, a minor league team is banished from its market once a major league team moves in. I can see a major league team in, say, the Research Triangle getting a lot of support from Durham Bulls rooters.
I think a big part of the problem with Florida baseball is that there was never a high-level minor league presence in the area. The Florida State League is single-A, and most or all of the teams had no local flavor, they were named after their major league parent, and played at said parent’s spring-training facility. The only two Florida cities that had minor league teams above A ball (at least recently) are Orlando and Jacksonville, which are not the markets that got the majors.
Northern transplants. That’s the only way to explain it.
Speaking of which, I was in a bar in Atlanta the night of the Braves home opener, and all the TVs were tuned to hockey. I asked for one of the TVs to be switched to the Braves game, and all the transplants complained bitterly and then moved down to the other end of the bar to watch hockey. Damn! I have to fight to get the Braves home opener on TV at a bar in Atlanta? Assimilate, you bastards!
I’ve often wondered what it would take to work up enough enthusiasm for sports like soccer, jai alai, cricket, lacrosse, and any other games that are more readily associated with foreign countries, to gain a foothold in the US (not just the South). Not long ago I read (or heard) that Nashville has a larger illegal immigrant population than any city east of Phoenix! That leaves room for plenty of speculation on what will be the first Latin American sport to hit it big in this area – and when that will happen.
Oh yeah. I remember being told by a cousin in Bladen county that we’d gotten the wrong sport to move to Raleigh. I think baseball would be the only real major league money maker in the Triangle area. As long as they don’t name it “Carolina”.
A “Carolina” team might work in Charlotte, which likes to draw North and South Carolina as one state with it in the middle, but not in Raleigh. Once you get away from the state line, most folks like to point out they’re from NORTH Carolina.
That, and would hate to have to cheer for a team called “Carolina”.
I am reminded about the late Jack Kent Cooke’s line about pro hockey in Los Angeles. He said he originally bought the LA Kings when he found out how many transplanted Canadians lived in the area, and then he later found out that they’d moved to LA because they hated hockey.
