Posted on 03/28/2017 1:37:56 PM PDT by C19fan
Las Vegas now have the NHL and the NFL... Ok when will MLB and the NBA join them? I doubt the NHL will succeed in Vegas...Phoenix is having trouble making money...
The NFL does have a Minor League, its called the Canadian Football League.
That is kinda true.
Problem is you’re missing the rivalries that already exist. If your region puts New Mexico together with Texas, especially if the stadium is in Texas, you just lost the NM market, they hate Texas they won’t be teamed with Texas. Same with SoCal and AZ. Try to get the UPpers rooting for teams heavily populated by non-UPper Michigan and Wisconsin and forget it. The country is filled with these regional rivalries that your 16 regions need to navigate around. Then of course you’ve got the problem of sports being a different level of popularity in different regions and drawing a different quality of player. You might get X-number of football high school students but if you’re in baseball or hockey country they’re not going to be the same quality as your Texas kids. That whole high school football worshiping part of the country will be better and win most of the championships, so competition quality just isn’t there.
If it was a more homogenized country it’s not a bad idea. But we are simply not homogeneous. It’s be a mess.
You are right that the smaller the regions the better, so as the league succeeds and expands from maybe 16 to start to 32 or more (hell, why not 100, there are more than enough good football players coming out of colleges), the issue of one rival state being paired with another would diminish.
They don’t form ties to randomly structured entities. Who has loyalty to “their” NFL division? That’s basically what you’re structuring here, it’s just not how people divide themselves. Auburn fans won’t necessarily root for Bama just because the opponent isn’t SEC, there’s plenty of Auburn fans that really enjoy watching Saban lose. People won’t just root for a team because you said they should. We see this over and over when teams get created or moved. Jacksonville has reduced their stadium capacity by about 15% and they STILL can’t sell out, everybody is predicting the Chargers will be playing to a mostly empty stadium in LA and their temp place only seats like 25,000. There’s a lot of work that goes into building that fan base, and having “local boys” doesn’t help much (look at Jake Plummer’s time with the Cards).
If you chop them up later you’re killing this regional loyalty you think you can make. And no there aren’t that many good players coming out of college. Hell there’s not enough good QBs coming out of college to fill the 32 team NFL, forget anything bigger.
Splitting regions for expansion would only enhance fan enjoyment. When you are rooting for Southern California vs. Texas, that is one way that LA and San Diego would root for the same team. Happily. But expand the league and give LA and San Diego their own teams and do you really think that it would detract from rivalry? I disagree with your take on that, too.
There are enough good QBs to fill out the league. There are, it is true, only a few elite QBs, but there are enough good ones that competition will be just fine. Hell, Peyton Manning won two years ago. Trent Dilfer. Joe Flacco. Eli Manning. All non-elite winners who got rings. Meanwhile some of the greatest ever never got one. Dan Marino, for one.
So, I disagree with all your points on this hypothetical thought exercise. But who knows?
College conferences are no different than NFL divisions. Especially in this modern age of conference movement. Maybe 10% of the fans will root for the conference, way less than all. Partly because of the blood rivalries within the conference, but also because the conferences don’t mean anything, they’re just a revenue pooling method. Most people do NOT root for their blood rival just because of some pointless alignment.
You ARE structuring NFL conferences, just as individual team. 16 regionally defined teams is basically doubling the number of conferences in the NFL and giving them all a team.
Splitting the regions just shows off how completely artificial they are and why nobody would root for the team. If you expect LA and San Diego to root for their own teams you’ve just shown why they absolutely will NOT root for the same team.
No, there aren’t nearly enough QBs to fill out the league. Non-elites getting rings proves my point. Not to mention the fact that Brock Osweiler can get a starting job.
Let’s just say that our inituitive beliefs about the nature of fan reactions to a regional team in a hypothetical professional football league are vastly different.
The only thing that keeps NFL ratings afloat is Fantasy Football and people watching to see how their Fantasy Players are doing.
There are going to be more Raiders fans in Los Angeles than in Las Vegas, and the Raiders will still be the most popular team in LA, over the Rams and Chargers.
It’s going to be real funny watching a Chargers’ “Home Game” when 90% of the fans in the stadium are rooting for the visiting team.
The SEC being the exception.
True, probably 80% of that 10% come from the SEC. There’s a fervor down there. Here in PACwhateverthenumberisthisyear we don’t care. The only time a fan of a PAC team wants some other PAC team to do well is to improve the “strength of schedule” for their team and get a better bowl.
Phoenix is having trouble making money for 2 reasons: 1 the team has absolutely stunk for most of its time there, 2 being way up in the northern suburb makes it hard to get to (for most of Phoenix it’s an hour away, for Tucson it’s 3). Glendale works OK for a football team that only has games once a week and mostly on Sunday, for 3 or 4 games a week it’s just too much, especially to go watch the home team get killed.
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