I’ve been telling myself (and others) that for YEARS (although a strong argument can be made that individual regular season games mean a LOT more in the N.F.L. than they do in other North American professional sports leagues).
Absolutely so. One game in the NFL is 6.25% of the total season (16 games); one game in the NHL or NBA (which both play 82-game schedules) is 1.2% of their season, and one game in MLB (162 game schedule) is 0.6% of the season.
So, as far as net impact on a team’s success, one NFL game is about 5 times more important than one NHL or NBA game, and about 10 times more important than one MLB game.
This is why NFL “power rankings” come out every week, and a team that’s considered near the top might suddenly be considered mediocre or even bad after a single loss, or suddenly great.
And it’s a better sport for it. Fighting was a waste of time, really. I want to see good hockey players play hockey.
Well, sure, but that doesn’t at all explain why basketball has more fans than hockey in the USA; the season is exactly the same length, and exactly the same number of teams make the playoffs. Nor does it explain why baseball, with fewer playoff teams but twice as many games, still ranks above hockey. It’s not the length of the season.
It doesn’t really explain the NFL, either. The NFL has more important individual games, yes, but then it always did, and was not as big a deal as it is now until the 1960s. What put football on top was their understanding of the importance of TV.
I’m with you 100%. If I want to see guys slugging it out I’ll watch MMA or boxing.
For the record, my earlier comment was meant to suggest that 20 minutes seemed too high. I’m a little surprised that baseball has more “action” than football does but that doesn’t change my mind, at all, about which sport I prefer.
No, it doesn’t; I had posted that in reply to the tangent, started by isosleepy, who said “Individual games are nearly meaningless,” and racepug, noting that he generally agreed, but not in the case of the NFL.
In my post, I had neglected to follow through with the point you’ve made (and with which I agree) that season length / meaningfulness of individual games isn’t a distingushing factor for hockey, and thus, probably not a reason why it is comparatively less popular.
Not only that, look at the net effect that the result of a single game, such as last Sunday’s Baltimore win over N.E., can have. Now all the [COLOR=“Black”]Ravens[/COLOR] have to do is draw even with the Patriots by the end of the season and they, and not N.E., will have home field advantage. On the basis of ONE regular season meeting between the two teams. You sure can’t say that very often (if ever) about any other professional sports league on this continent.
I always hate those articles because they basically define action as “ball in play,” implying that nothing else is going on in between. But a basketball player slowly dribbling his way to half court counts as “action.”
I think hockey almost has too much action for such a low scoring game. I’ve said this before but the main reason I like baseball and football is you can visibly see progression towards scoring. Moving down the field or getting runners on base. Compared to hockey where you have 30 shots on the goal per game but only getting 3 points. So much is going on all the time that I can’t tell what’s actually important.
Unless it’s the Seattle Mariners and they fall one game short of making the playoffs, which they seemed to do every year. :smack:
Be just good enough to have bad draft position but not good enough to be that relevant late in the year.
As for why ice hockey doesn’t capture the imagination with people the way football, baseball, and basketball do? I have no idea, but maybe one clue is that the N.H.L. was confined to the upper Midwest/Northeast (and Canada) for nearly 50 years. The sport seems that it’s a “natural” for those parts of the country; not so much in other places. I mean, do you think that Olympic ice hockey is covered/talked about much in places like Central or South America, Africa, Asia, or Oceania?
Going back to the six-team NHL days, hockey was extremely popular. They sold out the building for every game. But it was a small percentage of the city’s population; it didn’t have the attendance boxing had (pre-NBA) and the NBA quickly surpassed it. There is also little hockey infrastructure in the US, and the need to run the zambonis between periods – adding 40 minutes to the length of the game – made too many dead sports for TV. Plus it wasn’t easy to follow the puck.
After expansion, it was still popular, but the NBA and college basketball surpassed it (I’m not counting football and baseball, which were less of a competition).
Hockey is not a big college sport outside of Minnesota and Boston, and most colleges don’t have a varsity hockey team, meaning people don’t see it. High school hockey is even more limited.
So hockey in the US is too obscure for most fans.
Good thread, and I agree with a lot of what’s been said including fighting becoming almost non-existent.
One thing I wanted to mention about the puck being hard to follow, it really isn’t. If you grew up watching hockey, or if you became a fan later and started watching many games, you’ll find out that you don’t really follow the puck. That is, you know instinctively where the puck is by the way the play is developing. You don’t stare at the black dot during the game. Does that make sense?
Just to build on this:
The NHL only had six teams until the '66-'67 season; thus, there were only four U.S. cities which had an NHL team: Boston, New York, Detroit, and Chicago. (The other two teams in the “Original Six” were in Toronto and Montreal.)
The NHL began expanding at that point, and then absorbed several teams from the defunct WHA in the 1970s. But, up until the 1990s, there had been only one southern team (the Atlanta Flames, which wound up moving to Calgary in 1980), and only one team west of St. Louis and Minneapolis (the Los Angeles Kings).
In other words, hockey remained a sport with a regional appeal for decades after the other three big pro team sports had become national.
Thank you. That was my point, exactly.
No enough fighting.
I agree regarding following the puck on TV. I’m pretty sure I could look at an individual still frame with no puck and be able to guess where the puck was. That said, I understand that is because I’ve been exposed to hockey my whole life.
Much of the world could probably do the same looking at a soccer game, and I wouldn’t have a clue.
This. I think this gets at the heart of this issue. How can people be interested in a sport if there is no way to participate in it? Anyone can buy a football, baseball and mitt or soccer ball and start playing. To do hockey you need skates, stick, pads (knee pads at least) and … ice.
Not everyone lives near a rink, and most of the US is simply too warm to have outdoor ice, even in the winter.
Well, to be fair, one can become a fan of a sport even if you’ve never played it. I’ve become a rugby fan in the past few years, and I’ve never played the sport; I know several people who are huge fans of sports like baseball or football, but due to disabilities, have never actually been able to play the sports themselves.
But, I do suspect that, broadly speaking, there’s a relationship between sports that one follows as a fan, and that one has played (even casually).