The NFL has never been more popular. Today’s game will get extremely high ratings.
However, there a few things that should be at least a cause for concern.
This St. Louis situation could get real ugly. A team losing a game a year for 3 years? That’s no way to build a local fanbase and that puts an extra burden on a team like the Rams which already have a pretty bad travel schedule with trips to Phoenix, San Francisco, and Seattle every year.
The whole London game is a fiasco anyway. You’re never going to see the Giants, Jets, Cowboys, or Patriots giving up a home game. I really can’t see an NFL team permanently based in London. That’s too far to travel for 8 road games, especially if the London team is going to have any short weeks games.
Speaking of short week games, adding more Thursday night games is ridiculous. I’m getting sick of cable network vs cable company squabbles and I’m sure the NFL Network will continue to battle cable companies. Of course, there are people like me who cut cable and won’t be able to watch anyway. Short week games often suck anyway.
The blackout rule needs to be addressed. This isn’t the 1970s where the only way to watch is either over the air tv or by going to the game. The cost of going to an NFL game is extremely high and the NFL can’t count on a sellout of every game in every city every week. Not going to happen with current tv and internet technology.
Don’t even think about an 18 game season.
Don’t even think of expansion for Los Angeles. I can see the Jaguars, Rams, or both moving to Los Angeles.
I’m opposed to most of the things you’re talking about, but no, I don’t think these things indicate the NFL is on the verge of screwing up in a big way. The biggest thing the league could have done to kill its progress was a big labor dispute, and the lockout ended with zero canceled regular-season games and a 10-year bargaining agreement.
Incredibly, the Rams have decided the stadium St. Louis built for them just 16 years ago isn’t good enough, and want a new one. Their lease runs out soon and apparently it just isn’t good enough, so they have to the city they want a plan to build them a new stadium at taxpayer expense by the end of this month or they may exercise their right to leave.
On top of that the team has been pretty dismal for awhile so the fans aren’t exactly flooding City Hall with calls and letters begging for the Rams to be bought off.
The team originally moved the team from LA to St. Louis solely to take the City of St. Louis’s money when LA wouldn’t pony up for a new stadium; since there is now the promise of a new stadium in LA, they’re ready to move back.
Here in St. Louis, the stadium authority has given the Rams a first proposal for stadium renovations. The Rams will probably reject it, but that’s what negotiations are all about.
Meanwhile, the authority also insists the Rams can’t play a home game in London, under the terms of the current stdium lease. Everyone is saying the authority is playing with fire trying to be hardass about it, but I consider it a good bargaining chip.
I’m not entirely convinced the NFL wants a team in Los Angeles. I think it may be more valuable to let all the teams threaten a move to LA to get their way.
I think they’d like a team there, but under the right conditions and not at all costs considering LA’s football history. If LA gets a team, some other place will emerge as a new ‘we’ll move the team there’ cudgel- for example Toronto, Vegas, or whatever city lost the new LA team.
I’m trying to wrap my mind about the idea of LA wanting a to build a giant new stadium for a football team. Even if you ignore the legions of studies which suggest it’s a poor deal, the city from what I hear is having massive problems just staying above water. I highly doubt a huge bond measure for a massive stadium is in keeping with good fiscal practices.
To me there is one issue which looms above all others with respect to the future of the NFL: brain injuries.
Even in the pre-game (5hours!) for the Super Bowl there was an interview with a former special teams player that got ALS. Apparently incident rates for that is higher amongst ex-football players as well as other brain diseases. It’s only a matter of time before the NFL has to address this is in a meaningful way.
As to St. Louis… new owner, crappy dome (well, I think it’s crappy at least), small market (especially compared to LA), bad team. Pretty obvious why the locals are scrambling. You can add in that St. Louis is a baseball town and is much more wary of large giveaways to sports teams since the days when the Rams came to town. Even the Cardinals had to buck up most of the money for the new Busch Stadium and the Cards are way more beloved than the Rams.
If I were a St. Louisian I’d tell them “I you want a new stadium, build it and we’ll go”.
I still don’t get the urge of a city building those stadiums, unless you get a lot out of them aside from 8 or 9 football matches.
I don’t think either of the two most likely proposals are really being pushed by L.A. itself. One is actually in City of Industry, and the other is (supposedly) entirely private.
The Rams leaving St. Louis would be bad. They really don’t belong in the NFC West anyway and were only kept there because they had a decent rivalry at the time. But it’s not fair to them or their fellow West teams to keep them in that division. If any team is going to move to LA, I’d say it should probably be a team in a dismal market right now like Jacksonville.
Agreed. I understand wanting to get Europeans interested in the game, but shipping over sub-par teams and punishing whatever team gives up a home game isn’t the way to do it. Put a pre-season game there or maybe a pro-bowl game or something.
Thursday games are fine for exactly one day out of the season, Thanksgiving. I understand that they do it not to conflict with college, but they don’t even start until Thanksgiving anyway, other than the first week, so why not just let college end and do a Saturday Night game instead? They really need to minimize short weeks and find ways to compensate teams that play on short weeks by trying to time their bye to work with it.
Agreed. I’m not in danger of it affecting my team, but it’s got to be frustrating for teams in smaller markets or teams that don’t have history. When you had the Lions sucking for several years, they blacked out a lot. How is that supposed to build team loyalty. It sounds like it only hurts the teams doing poorly even more. If games aren’t selling out, it means the whole gameday experience is too expensive. Last time I went to a game it cost me almost $300 just for a pair of tickets and parking, and well over that when you throw in a little bit of food and a couple drinks. With the economy the way it is, no wonder games aren’t selling out with prices like that.
Absolutely. I understand that they think they’ll make more money with 18 games, but it won’t really be that much more since they’d be contracting pre-season games to do it, and it also means teams will get even more worn out by the end of the year. Instead, here’s my recommendation. Some teams play 5 pre-season games, like the hall of fame game and all. Bring an end to that and have exactly 4 for everyone or maybe only 3 and have a bye before the season starts. Instead, use that extra week gained from not having a fifth presason game to add one extra week to the season, but it’s an extra bye week and each team is guaranteed to have one in the first half of the season and one in the second half with probably some minimum number between them, and no byes on week one or the last couple of weeks either. This has many benefits. First, an extra week in the season means more prime time games, which means more exposure and probably a better TV contract. Second, an extra bye means teams have more time to rest up so you should have fewer injuries and a better overall product. Third, with another bye you can make attempts to time them to reduce disadvantages by lining up with short week games so they can rest up. Adding 2 more regular season games is just a bad idea.
Rams, no, St. Louis should have a team, and they’ll flop there since they weren’t even the main team when they were there before and will have a hard time winning back fans. As I said above, I can see the Jags working mostly because they’re in a small market now and just can’t attract enough fans to really make it.
I’d recommend anyone who’s interested in the above to read Alan Schwartz’s series on [=des_facet%3ACONCUSSIONS"]sports concussions and related dementia](http://nytexplorer.com/search?edit_facets=&q=“Alan+Schwarz”+concussions&commit=Search&facets[) which was published in the New York Times. He’s let on that concussions might be a bigger problem than he’s suggested in the series–and the series makes some pretty damning charges towards the NFL, basically arguing that the NFL knew concussions were a big issue decades ago but didn’t take even baby steps to do anything about them. I think it remains to be seen whether lawsuits over that are a ticking time bomb for the NFL.
They dragged their feet on it initially, but at this point everybody seems to agree that contact sports like football and hockey are linked to a higher risk of these kinds of problems. The question is what they can do about it. The new concussion rules are a start.
I see brain injury as a bigger issue than all of the others put together. Especially the impact of sub-concussive hits on brain health.
Folks are more concerned than ever about personal health and safety. Used up and broken NFL players are going to be more visible than in the past. All that will add up to the realization that we’re watching people destroy their bodies and minds for our personal amusement. Similar to the changes back in the early 1900’s when players were dying in unacceptable numbers, something will have to happen.
Totally agreed. What seems very likely to me is that more and more parents will refuse to let their sons play football in grade school and high school, due to (justifiable) concerns about brain injury. If that happens to a significant degree, the talent stream to colleges (and, thus, to the NFL) starts to dry up.
Yep, I’ve already made that decision. Unless something changes with this by the time he gets to football age (and that’s only a few years), I’m not going to let him play. It’s not the big hits, it’s all the small hits in practice over and over. I hate to do it, I played football, but I worry about the hits I took (I clearly remember “getting your bell rung”) and how it’ll affect me long term, and I was just a pee-wee to high school player.
The problem with the OP is that a lot of changes the NFL makes turn out to be highly successful or at least not the goose-killer <insert “flat spin” joke here> that everyone thinks it’ll be.
Monday Night Football
Thursday Football
Sunday Night Football
bye weeks
no football in L.A.
It is conceivable that an London team would be successful. But I understand why the OP might think not because they onsider a private flight from Missouri to Arizona and California to be bad.
The NFL is a very, very healthy business right now. I agree there are some issues, but all of them together wouldn’t cause the NFL to close up shop. They’ll be just fine.
For the record, I think the London game is dumb and I think a permanent team over there would be very dumb. Could they lure free agents? Would they generate a fan base?