Baseball over expanded? The major pro sports leagues are all the same size, more or less. How did baseball overexpand, but basketball didn’t?
My guess would be NCAA basketball as well - which is sort of cheating since it’s not one sport but a division thereof.
MMA will I think inevitably decline, but it’s going to grow for awhile yet.
Duke’s nomination of the NFL is interesting, and for another pro league possible due for some restructuring, the talk is that the NHL has at least 4-5 franchises in horrible trouble, but even if those leagues lost some popularity that would not so much be a decline the way boxing has fallen off a cliff, versus a national reset of their popularity to normal levels - in the NFL’s case, to it being a little bit less dominant and more in keeping with the actual entertainment value of the offering, and in the NHL’s case, an admission that people in Hamilton like hockey more than people in Sunrise.
Tennis and other racquet sports have been on the decline for a while. Yes, there are still big tournaments, but I see fewer people play tennis on a recreational basis. Every five years or so, another large indoor tennis club around here closes its doors.
Golf: no cite, but I think the average age of a golf fan is on the rise. I already know many who see golf as an “old man sport”. Golf has a high cost of entry (clubs, bags, clothing, shoes, etc) and green fees are pricey. Private country clubs are struggling.
I see hockey making a retreat from the Sunbelt, but remaining popular in the northern US and Canada.
The world series champion Giants this year only made the playoffs by winning the final game of the regular season.
In 1997 they also made it by one win.
In 2001 and 2004 (and 1993), the Giants failed to make the playoffs because of a single loss.
In 1998 the Giants lost a 1 game playoff.
So 6 of the last 18 years, the Giants’ playoffs hopes have come down to a single game.
That’s just one team. I’m not going to look up how often this happened for the rest of the league, but it appears that a single win or loss means everything surprisingly often.
Eh, it looks nice on paper, especially in retrospect, but the average fan does not feel that in July. I’m not even a big football fan, but I’ll give them that with ~16 games in a season, each and every one is dramatic.
Sure, but if your quarterback gets a concussion or your stud pass rusher tears an ACL, you’re screwed. You don’t have enough games to recover. I think the NFL will start to see an erosion of support, the lockout notwithstanding.
The labor agreement between the league and the players’ union is expiring (as of 3/1/11, I believe), and the two sides are apparently far apart. The owners claim that the format of the old agreement no longer works for them – they say that their expenses (both player salaries and other expenses) have risen, while revenues have not. The old agreement guaranteed the players would receive 60% of the teams’ revenues; the teams want to lower that percentage in the new agreement.
The union doesn’t believe that the teams are in as bad of financial shape as the owners claim (the fact that only one team, the Packers, is a public company, and, thus, the other 31 teams’ books have not been opened, doesn’t help).
If there isn’t an agreement by the time the old one officially expires, the owners are likely to institute a lockout – in essence, shut down the league until an agreement is reached. The teams will receive some of their TV revenue even in the event that the 2011 season doesn’t happen (though, as I understand it, that’s money that would have to be paid back), and the union is warning players that they should be saving their money in preparation for a lockout.
Based on what I see as a golfer at a number of local courses, golf is in no danger of dying. However, regular golfers (like me) may not be the ideal audience for the TV tournaments–we’re playing on Saturday and Sunday afternoons when the tournaments are on TV.
Boxing declined because many athletes who could do it wont. Few skilled athletes want to get their brains beat in for a living if they could have a good career doing something less dangerous. All sports risk serious injury, but only boxing has you getting punched in the face repeatedly.
Horse racing is only a sport to the actual competitors, To the almost all of the spectators its just gambling. And its not terribly exciting without the gambling buzz added in. I speak from personal experience.
Football is in decline because its players are focused too much on their ego and salary rather than putting forth the best effort to justify such things. The NFL as a whole is less a sports league than a merchandising company. And the games are just boring nowadays. Too many rules and penalties to protect these namby pamby millionaires who cry and moan like old ladies every time they so much as twist their ankle…Pussies.
Too many damn instant replays and coach challenges to determine where the guy’s goddamn toe landed, or to determine whether to spot the ball on the one yard line or the three. Too many punts and field goals. If it were up to me all teams would be limited to three field goal attempts per game and punting would only be allowed inside of your own 20 yard line. And no field goals whatsoever in overtime.If neither team can score a touchdown to win instantly, then neither of them deserve victory.
Boxers have to be happy with a draw all the time and go through a whole lot more punishment. So football players should be expected to deal. And that goes double for baseball if you cant outscore the other each other in four hours of play you get a tie. In fact baseball should be cut down to 4 innings, add some sense of urgency to this long, tortoise vs. tortoise snore fest. I only wish baseball were a tenth as exciting as it is in the movies.
On a side note basketball needs to get harder. Seriously, I once saw a guy do a goddamn spinning backflip while dunking the ball. Thats a sign that its a bit too easy. You don’t see tiger woods golfing blind folded or a nascar driver going in reverse do you?. So make it a bit harder. I say make the hoop 30 feet high and moving side to side. Maybe we will see some effort out of these guys.
US professional tennis has declined in that there are far fewer top American men players than there used to be (and when the Williams retire, it will be the same for the WTA). However, recreational tennis has increased and as a spectator event the US Open breaks attendance records almost every year (2010 had a slight dip).
Tennis may seem to be declining to the average sports fan because there are no American household names (apart from Roddick, who does not match up to the names later in this sentence), unlike the Connors/McEnroe/Sampras/Agassi days. Americans are not used to watching a couple of foreigners play all the time. Of all the grand slam events this year, there was an American (Roddick) in only one quarter final and later match.
Golf clubs of all types are struggling. There is overcapacity and the recession has hurt. Around here, the scramble to get customers has led to price-cutting, which is great for golfers but not for the courses. I have typically paid $20 - $25 for a mid-week round this year. However, I don’t see a long-term decline.
That may have played a small part, but the reasons Bijou Drains listed in the first reply to this thread are much bigger. Most elite athletes, consciously or not, decide to hock their bodies at a very young age in exchange for a taste of the rarefied air at the top of their sport. Boxing didn’t decline because boxers left; boxers left because boxing declined.
Another problem, among many, is that there is a weight class approximately every 3 ounces in boxing. This isn’t seen as a legitimate necessity by pretty much anyone except the businessmen who want more title fights to promote.
Now this I agree on! I know you’re exaggerating with the 30 foot moving goal, but I have a whole spiel about how to make baseball and basketball interesting again (including a 12 foot goal) that makes my wife’s head explode (she’s the team sports fan in the family).
Boxing has the WBC , WBA , WBO, and so forth . How are we supposed to know which one of those is the best group to rank fighters?
Also all the big boxing matches are on pay per view for $40 and up. That’s not a way to get a big fan base. What if the NFL had pay per view for their playoffs? It seems like boxing has decided pay per view is the only way they can make big money but it shuts out a lot of fans.
The UFC has been testing the waters more and more in the last couple years with “free” fights (I quote “free” because that’s their term, but the fights are actually on Spike TV, which is a cable channel). There are serious rumors about a possible network tv deal in 2011, though. It will be very interesting to see what that does for the sport.
Thinking about the OP: except for hockey in the Sunbelt, we’re rattling off mostly second-tier and third tier sports, if there could be such a thing. Tennis, bowling, golf and the like have an avid fanbase, but nothing like the widespread appeal of (American) football, basketball, hockey and baseball.
A while back, when I was doing some research and going through some newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, I was struck by how sports coverage was dominated by baseball, boxing and horse racing. Football, basketball, and other sports were just footnotes. Local newspapers even had “late racing editions”, late-night editions published after all the results from tracks in the Northeast had arrived. This was in the days when “off-track betting” meant “bookies”. Tennis, golf and the like never made it to the heights that boxing and horse racing once enjoyed.
FWIW, most of the people I knew who were old-school boxing and horse racing fans were from New York City, if that means anything.
You could have a 9,000 game season and 1 team could clinch the playoffs with a final victory - that doesn’t make the previous 8,999 games feel like they meant something.
Basketball and hockey both suffer from the idea that the whole season is just a preliminary for the playoffs. The playoffs are grueling and they are all that matter. Almost every team \makes the playoffs so the regular season has the feel of an exhibition schedule.
Actually, I think the NFL, and football in general may decline somewhat in popularity, because they’re finding that not only are concussions a lot bigger deal than previously thought, but more importantly, that the cumulative effects of sub-concussion level hits as occur to linemen on every play, can cause serious brain damage.
I suspect that rule changes are going to occur to change the way the game’s played that will disappoint a lot of the people who just watch football for the big hits. It might end up more rugby-like, or it may end up more like Canadian football where the linemen are a yard apart.
Baseball has had a long season for over a hundred years. The season occupies essentially the same period of time. There’s not the slightest iota of evidence that having a shorter season would increase interest.
What recently has made a 162-game season unattractive that didn’t make it unattractive in 1975? Attendance is certainly way up.
In the case of sports that have declined, something changed. Boxing was killed off by the creation of five or six (or however many it is) associations handing out a zillion belts, resulting in a lack of focus and legitimacy in any given champion. Horse racing was crushed by the legalization of other forms of gambling.
