The NFL is in trouble.
Their smug leaders, marinating in their grossly over-the-top collective sense of entitlement that permeates the league’s ivory tower, won’t admit it, but make no mistake about it, the NFL is in trouble.
Earlier this week RSR’s Kyle Casey penned a thoughtful piece about today’s NFL. It wasn’t complimentary but it was truthful. The NFL game just isn’t as enjoyable as it once was, mostly because it is over-policed by officials who are either confused by the plethora of rules and rules changes or they, as a group, just aren’t qualified to call games properly.
Or both!
We received over 100 comments with a similar tone, a similar frustration and a similar journey towards the front door of apathy. Apathy amongst its customer base is the last thing the NFL needs.
Yet the league’s leaders don’t seem to care. They are blinded by their pompousness and bloated TV ratings. But it’s not the quality of their product that attracts the big audiences. It’s gambling.
Gamblers don’t need a rooting interest. They don’t attach to a specific team – only the team that impacts their immediate financial future on any given Sunday. They don’t care that games are peppered with penalty flags tossed by clueless part-time employees. They only care about covering the spread or the point total in the game.
The NFL does get it.
Why else do you think that the league requires teams to provide injury reports thrice weekly? They don’t want the sports books to take a bath or the gamblers to take the pointy end of the screw. Imagine Aaron Rodgers showing up in street clothes on Sunday Night in Denver and backup QB Scott Tolzien is forced into action to cover the 2 ½ point line.
You know what would hit the fan!
The American Gaming Association estimates that $93 billion in illegal bets will be placed on college and pro football games during the 2015 season. Then there’s the relatively paltry $2 billion that will funnel through legal sports books in Nevada and Delaware.
But gambling goes beyond traditional sports book wagering, the Two For The Money-like toll free hotlines, the neighborhood bookies and the many online wagering sites that provide such action. Gambling also includes the booming industry of fantasy football.
There was a time when fantasy football was relegated to private wagering among friends who paid franchise fees that were pooled to distribute to playoff participants and champions. Even if your favorite NFL team struggled, interest in the league remained high because fantasy players had a vested interest. They had skin in the games.
You might hate the Pittsburgh Steelers but LOVE some Antonio Brown if he’s on your roster. So you watch even if the score is 45-10.
For decades these private leagues have flourished across the country. Today organizations like Fan Duel and Draft Kings have taken fantasy football to a new level allowing fans to bet as little as $0.25 on fantasy games and proclaiming that participants can win millions – even “a shipload of money!”
The difference between Fan Duel, Draft Kings and sports books is that Fan Duel and Draft Kings can operate legally in 45 states. The Wall Street Journal values them at $1.3 billion and $1.2 billion respectively.
How is such fantasy wagering so different than traditional betting which is legally allowed only in Nevada and Delaware?
The Draft Kings website explains…
“We are a US-based skill games company, and all of our contests are operated 100% legally under United States and Canadian law. The US Government and 45 of the 50 states consider fantasy sports a game of skill.”
And 45 states buy that?
Let’s be honest, there’s no more skill in setting fantasy football lineups than there is in handicappers who have watched trends, match-ups and team tendencies for decades. Both are games of chance.
Now I don’t know this for a fact but billion dollar businesses must attract the IRS and as such to allow them to continue Uncle Sam wants his. And this is just a guess, but to keep the Fan Duels and the Draft Kings of the world on the up-and-up, the NFL may have some lobbyists or other persons of influence convincing the IRS that such entities provide a service and a revenue stream for all.
According to iSpot.tv estimates, Fan Duel and Draft Kings combined to dump $107 million into the networks’ coffers since September – nearly half ($50.3 million) of that outlay was spent on national NFL broadcasts on CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and NFL Network.
Fantasy Football is going nowhere but up. It keeps fans engaged even when their teams have fallen out of the race (sound familiar?). It keeps them watching. Even parts of the country that don’t have a “home” team per se can develop iron-clad connectivity to the NFL vis-à-vis fantasy football.
League rules have changed to kowtow to the whims of fantasy footballers. Roger Goodell will tell you that the rules changes to boost offense are directly tied to what fans want. But all fans aren’t fantasy footballers. Some actually enjoy a slobber-knocker of a game that ends in a 13-10 score – you know, like those old, physical battles between the Ravens and the Steelers.
Those battles are more than likely a thing of the past in the National Football League, thanks in part to the league selling out to gamblers.
In some ways you can’t blame the league for morphing in this direction while feeding its insatiable appetite for revenue. It won’t be long before going to games becomes far too expensive with climbing ticket prices, PSL requirements, exorbitant concession prices, excessive parking fees not to mention the traffic clusters that make attending a game far more inconvenient than watching from home or even in neighborhood sports bars. This is further exacerbated by the declining quality of the product on the field and increases in game stoppages.
How soon, before the NFL is nothing more than arena football with better and more highly paid players?
And these aren’t the only concerns.
With the health related risks of football it’s likely that fewer kids will play the game. The career span is shorter and less lucrative than those of baseball and basketball. Isn’t it possible that parents begin to steer the best athletes away from the gridiron.
Might Will Smith’s upcoming movie Concussion, further accentuate the game’s risks? Will that force the league to retreat even more? Make even more rules changes to promote safety while limiting contact and thus erode the underlying attraction to the game?
No worries. There’s always gambling and fantasy football (gambling)!
That will lure in viewers.
Yet you have to wonder, that given the modern day ho-hum product, will fans tune in to watch traditional network games or might they just dial up NFL Redzone, a channel that shows all the scores without commercial interruption or protracted stoppages on the field triggered too often by incompetent officiating?
Think about that – “without commercial interruption”. Isn’t the foundation, the lifeblood of the NFL, TV revenue? If companies that traditionally advertise on NFL platforms catch on, will they peel back portions of their ad budgets? Might they try to reach the demographic in other ways?
Publicly the NFL will never admit they have a problem.
It’s symptomatic of their collective arrogance.
But Roger, you have a problem. A big one!
Until they figure it out there’s always gambling and fantasy football.
Both are saving the NFL, for now.
And you can bet on that!
