One and Done (or, Why That Other Sports Blog is Wrong)

Big Daddy Drew over at Kissing Suzy Kolber has a great post looking at why the NFL just happens to kick so much ass in television ratings. The main thrust of the argument comes down to “event mentality,” which he chalks up to the fact that people think of long-standing networks as somehow more authoritative:

Part of it is that “event television” mentality, an elusive concept that so many TV execs spend their four-hour workdays trying to capture. Simmons has long made a point of distinguishing play-by-play announcers by whether or not you feel like you’re watching a big-time sporting event. And it’s the same way with networks for me. If I’m watching the AFC title game on CBS, part of my brain believes there are a zillion other people out there watching it at the same time. Football fans. Casual fans. Young people. Old people. Rich dickhead people. Poor people. It makes me feel a little less lonely, even though that’s a complete illusion and the reality is that I’m a loser with two kids and no friends who’s watching the game by himself because he has nowhere else to watch it. But that self-delusion matters. If I’m watching the exact same game, and it’s airing on HGTV or something, that feeling is gone. Regardless of whether or not the game drew more viewers on cable. It’s a prejudice. It’s the world’s least meaningful prejudice, but it’s still there.

It’s an interesting argument, but I think Drew kind of sidles up to the truth and then takes off in the wrong direction. “Event mentality” is certainly the key to the NFL’s ratings, but it’s not primarily derived from network nostalgia. What it really comes down to is scarcity: there’s less football to watch, so naturally people watch more of it.

Part of it is sheer numbers: football’s once a week, and it’s all more or less grouped around one day, which most people in America have off and thus will spend looking for an excuse to sit around and drink beer. That’s not really the case with baseball, basketball, hockey, or what have you: I can watch the Pirates lose almost every day of the week, so chances are good I won’t be watching said loss at the same time as lots of other people. (And certainly not more people than are tuning into, say, “Two and a Half Men,” which has the same one-day-a-week edge that football does.) So, football is already pre-packaged with an event mentality: it’s all on one day, therefore said day is an Event.

But it goes deeper than that, too: the scarcity of football means that every game really, truly, honest-to-God matters. When you watch a football game, most of the time you’re going to see one team move up in the standings and the other team move down —as an immediate consequence of that game. Other sports don’t have that: their fluctuations tend to be a bit more curved and nuanced, and are most easily seen cumulatively after the fact.

This is most true during the post-season: you lose, you’re out. That’s it. Period. End of story. I was at the AFC Championship game on Sunday, and I can tell you that the second half of that game was one long, miserable stomach-churn, as I slowly watched the Steelers trickle away their chance at the Super Bowl. And not in a best-out-of-seven, “We’ll get ‘em next game” kind of way. Up until that last time-killing pass, the tension in the stadium was utterly palpable, and it was that way precisely because this was the Only Chance the Steelers had. (Luckily, they took it, which made the five degree weather and 7:00 a.m. flight back to Boston the next morning tolerable.)

So of course lots of people tune in to football games. They don’t want to miss anything. I can skip Game Three of the World Series and know, with complete mathematical certainty, that I won’t be missing the crowning of a new championship team. The only time you get stakes like that is in Game Seven, and no series is guaranteed to come to that. When it does, the ratings are higher, but they still don’t match football’s because there’s been a sort of dilution taking effect. Sure, for fans of the sport, a best-of-seven series can be thrilling at all times, and is arguably a much more fair representation of who the better team is. But it doesn’t really make for must-see-TV, especially when “Chuck” is on. And the networks have just about nothing to do with it.