Time is on football’s side

Bruce Dickinson (no, not legendary producer Bruce Dickinson, the other one!)’s line “Time is always on my side” in the above song would be rather appropriate for football executives around North America. In my mind, time (or more specifically, fans’ lack of time) is one of the big reasons for the increasing dominance of football on the American sports scene, a subject I’ve touched on before in relation to the NFL. There are many other factors involved as well, but the time crunch’s effects on football are worthy of further exploration given the recent frenzy around SEC Media Days (and those from other conferences) and the ongoing CFL season.

In the first half of the twentieth century, professional baseball was far more popular than professional football in the United States. College football had its devotees and was big in many areas (many without big-league baseball), but didn’t have the same national profile. One of the big reasons for this was that most fans followed sports primarily through their local newspapers, especially in the first few decades of the century. Both football and baseball translate well into print, but most papers ran small sports sections at the time and didn’t have the space for extensive coverage of college football outside of sending a writer or two to the local school’s games every week. Baseball, on the other hand, offered a fresh supply of games every day. This also made it easy for baseball fans to follow their team comprehensively merely by taking a couple of minutes each day to read the game stories from the day before and examine the standings. You could probably make it to an occasional game on weekends, but being a passionate and devoted fan of the sport required relatively little time, as there really wasn’t much more you could do to follow your team.

That changed with time, though. Baseball games began to be broadcast more widely on radio and television. You still could follow a team just through the papers, and many did, but for some, there must have been a sense that they were missing out. They weren’t the most passionate or committed fans out there any more, as they didn’t have the time to sit there and watch every game. It’s an issue of efficiency; reading a game story and the standings each day might perhaps consume five or ten minutes of your time, but watching or listening to an entire game would eat up at least two to three hours. There was so much more information out there that just keeping up with a team became exhausting for some. Now, obviously not everyone desired to follow their team that closely, but knowing a team authoritatively is one of the really fun things about sports for many. In baseball, that became much harder over time.

By contrast, both college and professional football offered easy alternatives that consumed less time.Their popularity was already expanding due to other factors, such as the suitability of the game for television, but the time crunch played a role in their success. Sports sections had become larger and more prominent in newspapers by this time, and they were devoting more attention to football. Football teams only played once a week, though, which caused papers to fill the demand for football coverage in mid-week with analytical pieces breaking down previous games and setting up the next weekend’s matchup. Many newspapers probably found this even easier than they thought it would be, as there are always plenty of stories around a football team; baseball lineups usually remain relatively constant, but football’s full of week-to-week injuries and position battles that make for interesting stories even on off days. However, those stories led to football teams being covered in much more depth than baseball teams; there would be a lot of coverage of both, but most of the baseball stories would be quick recaps of each game while the football stories would exhaustively analyze each game and go into great detail on many of the players. There just wasn’t as much room for that in baseball given the massive amounts of games.

For a case in point, consider Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie Wall Street. I don’t remember any evidence of him being a sports fan in the movie, but we’ll assume he was. Now, Gekko was a highly competitive individual and would presumably transfer that to sports. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just checking in on his team once in a while; he’d want to know as much about them as anyone else. In baseball, though, that would require a massive time investment; he’d have to watch, or at least listen to, his team’s games for a few hours almost every day in addition to reading stories and pieces about them. He might have pulled it off, but it would have interfered with his trading.

By comparison, it would have been very easy for Gekko to follow a football team exhaustively. In the 1980s, this would probably require reading newspaper stories for 15 to 20 minutes a day, perhaps catching the occasional football discussion on local radio and then spending a few hours on Saturday or Sunday watching the game either in person or on TV.

Moreover, the one-game-a-week model made it easy for football fans to find common ground. Most baseball fans I’ve met don’t watch every game their team plays, as that would take an incredible amount of time. Many don’t even follow how their team does in each individual game. Thus, it’s tough to have a water-cooler discussion in the office about last night’s baseball game, as you might have been the only one who watched it. With football, almost everyone will have seen or listened to at least part of the local team’s game, and those who haven’t will probably be at least vaguely aware of what happened. Because it requires less of a time investment than closely following baseball, football becomes a much easier discussion topic. Also, each game assumes a greater significance thanks to their scarcity.

Since the 1980s, it’s become harder to even follow football comprehensively thanks to the explosion of the Internet. There’s much more information out there than ever, and that’s a great thing for fans. However, the game discrepancy still favours football; even reading a plethora of pieces on a football team from a variety of newspapers, blogs and other sites generally takes less time than watching or listening to an entire baseball game. Moreover, productivity and efficiency have become even more important in recent decades, and work’s taken up more of our lives. It’s much easier to rationalize spending a few minutes each day reading about football or listening to radio analysis of your team on the commute in to work than taking several hours to watch a baseball game from start to finish every day.

This is also why offseason events like the SEC Media Days have become more prominent. In the past, when it wasn’t football season, most football fans would probably keep track of baseball for a while or just take a break from sports altogether because there wasn’t a great deal of information on football available in the offseason. Now, it’s not only possible to cover football all year, but there’s plenty of interesting information out there at all times. We now know much more about players than ever before, and the variety of professional team-specific and college-specific blogs out there mean there’s much more to talk about. National recruiting databases allow college football fans to keep track of high school prospects and debate their merits, while video highlights and extensive articles on NFL draft picks allow pro football fans to get a good sense of what their new players will be like before they ever take the field. There’s so much that can be covered in the football offseason; I’ve already written two comprehensive pieces on the NFL for The Good Point this offseason (with a third coming later this week), and I’m not even close to running out of ideas yet. There’s a demand for football information year-round, but it still doesn’t have to take a lot of time to process; maybe an interesting new take on one of your team’s prospects will come out every day or every second day and take you 10-20 minutes to read, allowing you to stay comprehensively informed about your team with a minimal time investment compared to other sports.

This time crunch has also played a role in the popularity of summer football leagues like the CFL. It used to be that many Canadians were either staunch CFL loyalists or devoted NFL fans. Many Canadian football fans, especially those from younger generations, follow both leagues these days. That’s largely thanks to the leagues’ offsetting schedules; there’s only a small bit of overlap in the fall. The CFL provides a football fix in the summer for NFL fans, while the NFL does the same in the winter for CFL fans. Thanks to the one-game a week model, even following teams in both leagues comprehensively takes less time than following a single baseball team to the same degree.

Other leagues also attract fans via their smaller time commitments. Soccer teams generally play two games a week at most, and they’re usually limited to two hours, which allows fans to follow their teams efficiently. In hockey or basketball, that frequently goes up to three or four games, but it’s still quite possible to catch every game if you’re a devoted fan. Baseball doesn’t make that easy. That’s not to argue that those other sports are necessarily better than baseball, and not being able to catch every game doesn’t necessarily pose a problem; it’s still quite easy to keep track of how your team’s doing even if you’re only able to tune into their games occasionally. However, for many, that doesn’t provide the same sense of knowledge about a team that you can get in football with the expenditure of less time and effort. For hardcore fans, time is not on baseball’s side.

Raise a Glass

Put the Glass Down

Tags: andrew bucholtz, Baseball, CFL, college football, football, mlb, nfl, time crunch
Categories: Daily Specials, Domestics, Imports

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Daily Specials, Domestics, Imports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.