Boxing and horse racing were both hugely popular in the United States and now they’re minor sports.
What sport that is currently popular do you think will decline in popularity?
I’m going to say college basketball. The NCAA will expand the tournament to 96 teams eventually. Filling out a 96 team bracket isn’t fun, it is work. Plus, I think the appeal of filling out the brackets isn’t as big of a deal with fantasy sports allowing you to manage your own teams. There won’t be any bracket busters talk for a 96 team tournament. Plus, I think the NBA will change their policy and allow high school seniors to enter the NBA.
With the NFL likely to drag their season out into late February, I think the arrival of an NCAA tournament that requires a spreadsheet to follow won’t be as big of a deal.
Boxing went downhill because they have too many titles and people think it’s rigged for some fights. I don’t think horse racing is good for TV since the race lasts just a few minutes.
Tiger Woods made golf much bigger and if he continues to struggle I can see them losing fans unless someone else like him comes along. College sports have built in fans via the alumni and also people related to alums such as kids, parents, etc. Also some areas have no pro sports like Alabama which helps make college sports very big.
I think horse racing was popular because for years it was about the only form of legalized gambling you could go to. But when other forms of gambling that were easier to figure out, the ponies declined. Plus there are no horses around that last for several years to build interest like Kelso and Seabiscuit. If a 3 year old wins a couple majors, it’s off to the stud farm (do they have heart shaped stalls and Barry White music, to borrow a line from P J O’Rourke?).
One sport that is in serious decline and may be bankrupt a few years ago is open wheel racing (cars in the Indianapolis 500). Former Professional Bull Riders leader Randy Bernard is trying mightily to revive interest and has gotten several engine manufacturers to enter in 2012. But what happens that year when their most popular driver, Danica Patrick, takes her
sex appeal and one career victory to NASCAR as she is expected to do? Right now former champions Tony Kanaan and Dan Wheldon can’t find rides. A few young Americans like Graham rahal and Ryan Hunter-Reay have found rides but will other young racers? Most of the races are on Versus which does a good job but have one-quarter the viewership of the races on ESPN, let alone the NASCAR races the wideworld leader has. At some point the George family, which has lost a couple hundred million since Tony George decided to challenge the popular CART series will pull the plug on the Indy Racing League if they continue to lose money.
I think boxing declined because of its irregularity. You don’t have teams to follow and you don’t have a regular season to watch. You don’t even have a regularly scheduled event like the World Cup or the Masters Tournament or the Kentucky Derby.
To market boxing, you first need an interesting individual like Muhammad Ali. Then you need to have other competitive fighters for him to fight to avoid it being a “chump of the month” situation (boxing benefitted because Ali was fighting people like Foreman and Frazier and Norton). And even then you have to try to build an audience for a sport where fans have to wait months between fights.
I think golf and tennis are also vulnerable for these reasons. They do have major annual events but most of the rest of what I said applies to them.
Agreed. When I was a kid in the 1970s, the Indy cars were the racing cars that people knew. The Indy 500 was a huge deal on the sports calendar. Drivers like Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Al and Bobby Unser, and Johnny Rutherford were very well-known in the sports world. NASCAR has completely usurped the role that “Indy cars” used to hold in American sports. Other than Danica Patrick, I doubt that most American sports fans could name an Indy-car driver today.
Golf is in no danger – it never needed big stars (though they helped) and it’s doing fine on TV.
Horse racing actually declined because of gambling. One OTB came along, it changed from a sport to a cash cow. A star horse might help, but very few horses ever raced more than three years even in the good days.
Harness racing is even worse off. They are down to only around 60 tracks, mostly in the northeast, and many of those that remain open only do so by adding other types of gambling (slots, casinos). I can’t remember when there was a harness race on TV and 99% of Americans can’t name a major harness race, let alone the most recent winner.
Even worse is Quarter Horse racing: only 40 tracks.
None of the big four are in danger (hockey is closest), and NCAA basketball won’t be hurt in the slightest by a bigger field (it will probably help).
NASCAR is not as big as it was a few years ago. Some of the old time fans don’t like the newer drivers and they don’t like having so many races outside the south. Most of the small southern tracks lost their races to places like Kansas, Vegas, LA, etc.
Hockey’s problem is that the NHL chose to expand aggressively into warm-weather markets, where the sport didn’t have an established history or fan base…and, in a number of cases, they did this at the expense of the sport’s smaller, northern markets (i.e., Hartford, Winnipeg, and Quebec City all saw their teams move south, although at least the Nordiques moved to a logical hockey city (Denver)).
LPGA golf has really hit hard times over the last few years, they have lost a bunch of tournaments. One reason that gets the blame is they are being overrun by Asian players who dominate and win many tourneys. Many of these women do not speak English and they tried to put a rule in that required them to learn English. After a big uproar they backed down and scrapped that rule.
Apparently as of this year Greyhound racing is down to 23 tracks in seven states, a decline of over 50% in the last decade. It ain’t dead, but it’s on life support.
I think there should be a distinction between sports that have already declined, and sports that will in the future.
Sports that have already declined, not counting the ones already mentioned: pro bowling (I still remember weekly televised bowling tournaments on network TV, now those are long gone…and the tournament schedule is a shadow of what it was), jai alai (biggest gambling sport in Florida for a while, killed by corruption and other gambling avenues), and pro wrestling (just not what it was in the past–still big but not the juggernaut it was).
A couple picks for sports that will decline: MMA. It’s not a bad sport but I see it suffering from the same problems with boxing that Little Nemo outlined. Yes there are big tournaments but there are too many of them: too many titles floating around. And the corruption that plagued boxing is bubbling under the surface…remember the guy that beat Kimbo Slice and immediately stated that he’d been asked to take a dive? A bigger scandal could hobble the sport.
And I’m going to go out on a big limb here: pro football. Seriously. First of all, the NFL has nowhere to go but down. Secondly, unless something is done about player injuries, parents are going to start telling their kids not to play football (I already know parents who do), and that’s going to hurt the sport’s image. Thirdly, the push for an 18-game season is too much…it’s going to water down the season, increase the injuries (which ties back into point #2), and end up being a black mark on the league. Fourthly–and the biggest one–the NFL’s owners are just greedy enough to lock out the league for 2011-12. Think of how much labor shutdowns hurt baseball and hockey. The NFL isn’t too big to be hurt by one too.
I’d say these are signs the opposite is true. NASCAR is growing. It used to be a regional sport with a smaller fanbase. Now it’s a national sport with a much larger fanbase. The old school fans may resent all the newcomers that have jumped on the bandwagon but this expansion has helped the sport overall.
Attendance and TV ratings are markedly dropping. There are any number of reasons for this: cookie-cutter speedways instead of unique racetracks, false yellows at the end of races clearly dominated by a particular driver in order to create an artificial race to the flag, the car of the future, etc.
NASCAR, in my opinion, forgot why they were popular.
If they’re going to keep expanding the playoffs, which Bud the Slug is suggesting, then the regular season should be cut back to 154 games.
But the real problem with the playoffs is that there are far too many off days. Baseball is meant to be played every day. Taking eight days to play a five game series is a joke. It would also shorten it, mostly–not always, if the League Championship and the World Series started as soon as possible instead of at a date set by the longest possible extent of the previous series.
There was a time when horse racing was easy to figure out. Track programs listed the horses and jockeys and saddlecloth numbers, and a little other information such as owner and trainer and morning line odds; and newspaper selections were plain: first, second, third picks, for a given race. Sometimes, simple commentary was included with selections in the track program or newspaper, or there were tip sheets written in plain English that could be purchased. For those who wanted more statistics, there was the Daily Racing Form with its past performance and result charts, but being able to read the DRF wasn’t necessary to enjoy a day at the races.
At some point over the last twenty years, racing got complicated. Track programs now include past performance charts, and there is no longer informed, plain-English commentary in them–instead, they give “mutuel ratings” which are selections based on morning line odds. The newcomer to racing will have no idea of what these are, however. Newspaper selections now look like the DRF’s old graded handicaps (i.e. incomprehensible to all but those who are in the know); and the DRF itself has become far more complicated than it once was, with the addition of speed ratings and “how this horse did at this distance on a wet track two years ago” features that clutter things up. I can read the DRF and a program’s PP chart, but that’s a skill I acquired over a period of years. A newcomer would be absolutely lost.
In short, unless you can make sense of columns and rows of figures, each of which means something, you’re going to be confused. The newcomer to horse racing has little to no chance of understanding what’s happening–if he or she is going to wager $2, there are far easier ways to do it. I am sad to see horse racing on the decline, but I think the racing industry did it to itself.
NFL ratings are flat but yet every new TV deal brings in more money. I read that the reason is that advertisers want to reach guys who watch FB because they are hard to reach via ads on other programs.
MMA is vulnerable if too many promoters continue to churn in and out of the sport, which creates the problems you’re suggesting, such as too many titles. This looked like it could be happening a couple years ago, but seems to be slowing down. If the UFC successfully cements its status as the dominant league, like the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, then MMA isn’t going anywhere.
A couple things to remember about the guy who was “asked to take a dive”: first of all, he wasn’t asked to take a dive, he was offered a bonus to keep the fight standing up. Secondly, he sung like a canary immediately. Third, the promotion that fight took place in folded pretty much that night.
You know what might pique my interest in baseball again? Have something like < 50 games. I realized when I was about 12 that any given win or loss meant NOTHING, and I’ve hardly watched a baseball game since then. The NBA has the same problem with scoring: who gives a shit about any particular basket when there’s going to be 100 of them in a 48-minute game?