Sure, it’s Super Bowl weekend, but …
It's Super Bowl weekend. Allegedly, the biggest weekend in sports. And I gotta tell ya - I couldn't care less.Oh, it's not that I have anything against football or the NFL. Football is a great sport. It's just not, in my mind, the greatest sport. I'm a baseball man. Always have been. More on that later.
On TV and on radio, the NFL is constantly hyped as the most popular sports league in America. To hear folks like ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd blather, the NFL is more popular than all other sports combined. And while I've never doubted the NFL is wildly popular, I'm not buying that the NFL dominates the sports landscape in America to the extent that a lot of talking heads would like us to believe.
Baseball, auto racing, basketball and golf are pretty popular in America, too. The NHL is popular to the point that it could take an entire season off and still come back. Hunting and fishing are popular as well. And what about tennis? A pretty popular sport, I'd say.
Sure, NFL games normally get the highest TV ratings. But how believable is a Nielsen ratings process that samples just 1 in 10,000 Americans?
That's not saying I doubt the NFL is the most watched sports league on TV. It very well could be. But I've watched probably less than four quarters of an NFL game this season. In fact, I've watched far more NHL than I have NFL. So, considering that and the fact that Nielsen samples just 1 in 10,000 Americans, why am I to believe the NFL is almost always the most watched sports league on TV?
Back to baseball. Last summer, nearly 80 million tickets were sold for major league games and another 43 million were sold for minor league games. That's 123 million tickets, which makes for a pretty good argument that baseball hardly stands in the shadow of the NFL.
Ask around the sports department and a couple other desks here at the Morning News and you'll find more people who say their favorite sport is baseball than football. That's not saying they won't be watching the Super Bowl. But it does mean, I think, that baseball doesn't trail football by very far - if any - in popularity.
The problem when it comes to ranking the most popular sports in America is there's really no absolute concrete way to know. There are just too many factors to consider. Baseball has a 162-game regular season and plays every night of the week. The NFL has a 16-game regular season and plays a couple nights a week. Across the board comparisons are impossible. And, too, saying one sport is greatly popular than the other is impossible.
For millions of baseball fans, this weekend means so much more than football. The Strat-O-Matic company (http://www.strat-o-matic.com) releases its annual update to its baseball game this weekend. The Caribbean World Series (http://www.mlb.com/mlb/events/winterleagues/?league=cs) gets under way this weekend. And spring training (http://www.mlb.com/spring_training/y2008/index.jsp?c_id=mlb) is less than two weeks away.
The Super Bowl just happens to be in the way.
Posted by on 02/01 at 05:55 PM
