Nothing like an old-fashioned butt-kicking to bring a 3-0 football team back to reality in a league where parity is the most consistent trend. I’m not sure how the Ravens lost their first two games earlier this month but based on last night’s dominating performance against the Bills, who looked truly over-matched in all three phases of the game, they probably won’t lose many more. They earned the top seed in the AFC last season for good reason and will again be relevant in January. The Bills haven’t suffered a blow-out loss since a home thrashing by the Colts three years ago.
Going into last night’s game, the Bills v Ravens all-time
series counted only 11 games with the Ravens leading 6-5. This of course does
not include the period before Art Modell moved his team from Cleveland to
Baltimore for the 1996 season. Going into last night’s game, the Bills had won
the last two, including a 17-3 playoff game in January of 2021 where Taron
Johnson returned an interception over 100 yards to seal the win before a few thousand
COVID-weary fans in Orchard Park.
What follows here is not buyer’s remorse in any shape or
form but my recent investment in Buffalo Bills seat licences - which is obviously
a long position in the NFL itself - is not one without risks. The main risk is
that the desire on the part of North American sports fans to watch live NFL
games on TV may diminish over time. Television and the massive network broadcast
deals which the league has been able to secure represents the main source of
revenue for the NFL and its team owners. Over the past few years, fantasy teams
and the ubiquity and popularity of legal gambling – through game-by-game
results, individual player production and a myriad of propositions on which to
bet have further boosted the NFL’s already massive TV ratings. Just when it
seems like televised NFL games couldn’t possibly attract any more viewers, every
year, including the first three weeks of the 2024 season, ratings somehow move
ever higher. NFL Network operates year-round - not only during the actual five-month
football season but attracts impressive viewership even during the seven-month
off-season. The live games themselves together with pre-game and post-game
analysis on the major networks dominate Sundays from mid-morning to midnight
and the NFL on TV has a firm grip on Thursday nights and Monday nights too. Is
there such a thing as too much football – a saturation point beyond which some
fans may turn away from sheer exhaustion? So far, the answer seems clearly to
be no. It isn’t clear how the NFL could possibly push it further - other than
adding an 18th regular season game for each team which feels like a
done deal starting in the next couple of years – but if they can come up with a
strategy to push the envelope further, they surely will. How far can it really
go? The league came up with a tagline a few years which it doesn’t use much but
I’m sure they paid consultants a fortune for it: “Forever Forward; Forever
Football”. I would add “Forever Upward TV Ratings”.
I see another long-term risk on the horizon for the NFL in
the form of a diminishing pool of players. While junior, high school and college
football all remain very popular in the United States, the number of high schools
which field football teams every year is declining. Maybe not by enough to make
a difference quite yet but the trend seems clear. In 2016, I attended Homecoming
Weekend - my class’s 35th graduation anniversary - at Ridley College
in St. Catharines. I had always enjoyed the Saturday afternoon of Homecoming
Weekend in the field-side beer garden, catching up with old friends and
cheering on the football team as they played UCC or SAC or TCS. But, unbeknownst
to me, starting a couple of years before, the football program was cancelled. I
ended up having a fairly long conversation that day with the relatively new
Headmaster at the time and I asked him why the football program was no longer. He
explained that there were several reasons: (1) injury liability / insurance
costs: How many youth football players died in the US this fall? At least two
or three that I saw reported. How many serious knee injuries and concussions
were there? Too many to count. (2) declining interest on the part of students
and probably more importantly, their parents. Remember when Justin Timberlake
said a few years ago at his press conference the week before he was to take the
stage at the Superbowl halftime show, in response to a reporter’s question about
possibly seeing his son in an NFL uniform one day “my kid won’t be playing
football, that’s for sure”? “Wrong answer” is what Roger Goodell undoubtedly
said to himself as he watched Timberlake’s press conference. (3) cost: 50 or 60
sets of football equipment is pretty expensive compared to the equipment needed
for just about any other sport. Coaches, trainers, doctors and managers suck up
school resources which could be allocated elsewhere. He told me that it was a difficult
decision but an inevitable one. I guess there was soccer game to watch that
afternoon somewhere but no one seemed to care.
We already see that the majority of NFL players now come
from mostly black, mostly low-income backgrounds in the southern states. High
school football games in Texas and Georgia and Alabama still attract 10,000 or
more fans on Friday nights and that will probably continue for a long time. But
in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Maine, the number of high schools with football
programs will continue to decrease over time – maybe quite slowly but eventually
enough to reduce the talent pool which will continue on to play in college and
then the NFL. We will still watch NFL football on television for the time
being. But 20 or 30 years from now……..ok, we will probably still watch then too.
And bet. And obsess over our fantasy teams. And that’s why I went long on the
NFL.
Up next for the Bills is another tough road game, this time
in Houston against Stefon Diggs and the Houston Texans. It’s a rare Sunday 1pm
game.
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