Less is more: how the scarcity of NFL games has boosted the league’s popularity
Quick, what’s the most dominant sport in the U.S.? By just about any metric, it’s the National Football League, which blows everything else away in terms of franchise values, league revenues, television ratings and more. Many explanations have been proposed for the NFL’s success, ranging from viewer enjoyment of its violence to how its product translates to the television screen to the appeal of fantasy football and gambling on games, and all of those factors have played a role in the league’s rise. However, what might be at the core of the NFL’s dominance is a relatively simple and somewhat counterintuitive idea: the scarcity of NFL games.
At first glance, that seems somewhat illogical. Why would playing less games help a sport? Upon further reflection, there are plenty of benefits to the idea. With a 16-game regular season, every game can be crucial to a team’s playoff hopes. Every game becomes an event, and even many relatively casual fans will watch every time their teams play. Compare that to the 82-game seasons in the NHL and NBA and the 162-game seasons in baseball, where it’s difficult for even diehard fans of a team to catch every single game. It also helps that the NFL games tend to be at similar times each week; while there are some games Thursdays, Saturdays and Mondays, your team will often be playing around 1 p.m. local time on Sunday, so it’s easy to set up a game day ritual. This makes the NFL a great subject of water cooler discussion: you can bet the football fans in your office are watching their team in every single game, while that isn’t always the case in other sports.
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Spreading games out to once a week also magnifies the importance of each individual game, and the amount of focus on it from both traditional media outlets and blogs. In baseball, there’s a game almost every day during the season, so it’s tough to have a huge amount of pre-game or post-game coverage, given how you have to get ready for the next one. Similar principles apply in hockey and basketball. With the NFL, there’s usually a whole week between games, so the first few days can be spent breaking down the last contest and the following bunch hyping up the next one. Given the size of football rosters relative to every other sport’s, there also are more potential storylines out there, which helps to ensure that there’s still plenty to talk about mid-week. Moreover, given the short season, other teams’ games can have more of an immediate effect on your team, so there’s incentive to watch games beyond just ones where you have a rooting interest.
Scarcity comes into play in other areas as well. One is in ticket prices. The value of a NFL ticket tends to be substantially higher than an equivalent baseball ticket, and a large portion of that is straight supply and demand; your local NFL team will have eight home games a season, while the MLB team will play 81. That limited supply of games allows the NFL teams to charge higher prices, and it also reduces their costs, as they don’t have to staff their stadiums to event levels as frequently.
Of course, in order for higher ticket prices to pay off, you still have to find ways to draw fans to the stadiums. The NFL is good at this from several angles, though. For one thing, most NFL games take place on Sunday, a day where it’s often easier for fans to spend a lot of time at a sporting event than it would be on a weekday. The scarcity comes into play as well, particularly for selling season tickets; it’s much easier to convince someone to set aside eight days for NFL home games than 82 for baseball or 41 for hockey or basketball. That also fuels the popularity of tailgating; NFL games are rare, making them an event every couple of weeks, and that helps convince fans to spend even more time getting ready for them. The NFL’s blackout rules have historically helped as well, convincing some who’d rather watch on TV to head to the game instead; we’ll see if that continues as TV coverage continues to get better and ways to evade the blackouts start to grow.
Scarcity comes into play with both fantasy football and gambling, too. A strong argument can be made that the primary reason for fantasy football being so much larger than other fantasy sports is the ease of play; you only have to set your rosters once a week, and there’s so much coverage in the leadup to each game that it’s relatively easy to figure out who’s playing well and who isn’t. It’s also easy to watch your players, as some of them will likely be in the nationally-televised matchups Sunday night and Monday night. Gambling’s a similar story; with games only on a couple of days a week, you have a whole week to think about the picks you want to make.
One area where scarcity could potentially have hurt the NFL is the long offseason. There aren’t any games from the Super Bowl in February until the preseason in August, and that’s a substantial break that could have the effect of putting the league out of mind for some. It hasn’t worked out that way in many cases, though, and the factors that have helped drive the NFL’s in-season popularity have also boosted the appeal of offseason events like the combine and the draft. In fact, in some ways, the NFL’s short season may work well; because there’s so much hype around each game and so many teams are still in the playoff races late in the year, a longer season might lose some of the appeal. The NFL is a brief storm of intensity for the fall and winter each year, and that’s worked out very well for it.
That’s not to say that just playing less games is solely responsible for the NFL’s popularity. The early NFL played even less games in the 1920s and 1930s, with teams usually only playing 10-12 games a year, and it was very much an afterthought on the sporting landscape. Other elements such as the suitability of the game for television, changing audience tastes and the rise of fantasy and gambling have certainly helped. The scarcity thesis is worth consideration, though, and it’s worth noting that other massive sports such as college football and European soccer also have used limited schedules to their advantage. It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that a league is better off to play fewer games, but in the NFL’s case, it seems to work well.
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