The NFL is going into a death spiral. The more business savvy owners like Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft realize this, but the pill-popping morons like Jim Irsay do not. For many years, the NFL business model was:
1. Escalating TV Contracts
2. Public purchased playgrounds and subsidies.
While #2 is not yet threatened, #1 is. The players salary cap is tied to the TV contracts, and so long as the TV contracts keep going up, so do players’ salaries. However, the TV contract must have viewers to watch in order to generate the ad revenue to support the contract. ESPN is finding out that all of their escalating long-term sports contracts are not sustainable because their viewership is actually declining. That’s why they are bleeding money.
Many reasons for this. One is that fans are “cutting the cord.” Cable services have outpriced their market in the Stalinist belief that “quantity has a quality of its own.” Yes, you get lots of channels with cable, but they are mostly crap. Sports fans are now moving to direct streaming through the league’s packages, like NHL Gamecenter (now if I can figure out how to get a credit card with an Alaska zip code, I’ll never be blacked out of a Blackhawks or Bluejackets game).
The other reason is what’s obvious here; people have become turned off by the product itself. Even before the politicization of sports, NFL games are virtually unwatchable due to the commericials and lack of continuous play. I describe the NFL as combining the two worst things of American life; sudden acts of violence punctuated by committee meetings.
So, watch what happens when the current network contracts expire, and this time they come to the league with less money, and that means less money for the players. Let’s see how the Michael Bennetts of the league react to that. Jones and Kraft know this is the future, and they need to do everything to mitigate it, and that includes avoiding the politicization of the sport.
And of course the players will be the last ones to realize they’ve killed the golden goose.
Look what has happened to network television and to the entire movie industry. This is going to be repeated through the entire entertainment sector of our economy.
The NFL's problem is magnified simply because it is so big that it has much farther to fall than most other entertainment options.
Sturgeon's Law in action, except that Ted Sturgeon understated it. (It's more than 90%)
And I'm stealing and rewording one of your statements for a new tagline!