[marron]

You could consider the whole NFL thing a kind of “tulip bulb” bubble. And the bubble has burst.

People were willing to wrap their lives around NFL football because they had come to feel some kind of bond between themselves and their favorite teams, they felt that how the team did reflected something about themselves, they cared about individual players and how they did. Its one thing to pay a few bucks to see a college game, its entirely another when you are spending hundreds because it is really important to you.

But absent this “bond” between team and the fan, its just a bunch of millionaires throwing a ball around, and who really cares? That’s what these guys failed to recognize, the importance of the bond with their fans. So they an still play ball, but no one is going to pay them millions to do it, because no one really cares who wins.

[aquila48]

I like it more to people kicking the habit of a drug en mass and watching the street price of the dope tank.

[Alberta's Child]

"... tickets for Sunday’s matchup between the Buffalo Bills and Indianapolis Colts sold for as little as $2."

When people aren't even willing to pay $3 to see an NFL game, you may as well be at the point where you have to pay people to attend.

[Alberta's Child]

People were willing to wrap their lives around NFL football because they had come to feel some kind of bond between themselves and their favorite teams ...

That's an excellent point, and it's worth noting that this bond began to sever long before Colin Kaepernick and the idiots involved in this national anthem controversy came along.

I've said for years that the NFL took a serious turn for the worse (though it didn't start to decline for some years afterward) when they adopted the salary cap and loose free agency rules in the mid-1990s. After that point, you had so much turnover in a team's roster from one year to the next that this "bond" began to break.

As one Freeper so astutely pointed out a few months ago: "Kaepernick's biggest crime is that he reminded a lot of NFL fans how much they already disliked the NFL."

[Wally_Kalbacken]

Yes, there is a great asymmetry between pre-anthem protest attitudes toward the NFL and post-anthem protest attitudes toward the NFL, and they ain't getting that one back in the bottle.

I actually went to see MSL in Atlanta, and really enjoyed it. [Arthur Blank has hedged his investment in the Falcons with ownership of the Atlanta United.]

I have found a variety of things to do on Sundays, like going to the gym, and I am not looking back.

Biggest brand suicide, ever.

[Professional]

Well said. The veil is lifted, the illusion gone, and best of all? Never to return.

[patriotspride]

But absent this “bond” between team and the fan, its just a bunch of millionaires throwing a ball around, and who really cares? That’s what these guys failed to recognize, the importance of the bond with their fans. So they an still play ball, but no one is going to pay them millions to do it, because no one really cares who wins.

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Well stated in all regards