The author of this article has it all wrong. In pro sports these days, the fan is not the consumer . . . the fan is the product. The largest source of revenue for the NFL is from television, which means that what they are really selling to their customers (TV networks and advertisers) is access to NFL viewers.
The evidence of this is that an NFL game that fills a television slot of 3 to 3.5 hours will typically only have 11-15 minutes of actual football on the field.
With that in mind, American football ought to be remembered as one of the biggest con jobs in modern history.
I appreciate you cynical view and on a micro level it is accurate. On a macro level, the fan is the customer because that is who the network wants to reach and if the fan doesn’t like the product, the fan won’t watch. As ratings decline, the price the networks bid will decline and evetually won’t buy if things are bad enough.
We can debate beyond that but ultimately - without the fan’s participation, it dies like any other business venture.
“With that in mind, American football ought to be remembered as one of the biggest con jobs in modern history.”
“The evidence of this is that an NFL game that fills a television slot of 3 to 3.5 hours will typically only have 11-15 minutes of actual football on the field.”
Gives Obama TV plenty of time to run “stupid white man” commercials. Screw TV and the NFL.
Seems like more and more owners are Democrats and friends of hussein.
That whole 11 minute thing has been one of the all time stupidest “stats” dumb reporters have been waving around for 25 years. It goes under the completely false assumption that the only time football happens is between the snap and the whistle. 90% of whether a play succeeds or fails is determined by pre-snap reads and adjustments, that 20 seconds BEFORE the snap, any “stat” that pretends that time doesn’t matter is, quite simply, a lie. And you know football better than that.