God bless America! I finally got my fix of real NFL football. It was the Hall of Fame game, a pre-season tradition that started I don’t know how many years ago but they’ve been broadcasting it for maybe a decade now, maybe less, but it has always been this early. As much as I love baseball, it has definitely lost the title of America’s game to football.
There is now a 24-hour NFL Network on cable; the NFL draft has become a huge media event; the Madden NFL football video game is a phenomenal success, far outselling it’s baseball counterparts, which, again, builds generations of fans. The NFL also does a far better job of marketing itself–especially to black youth. Major League Baseball has seen a steady decline in the number of black players. Finally, the NFL has structured their economics and draft so that at the beginning of any given season, any team has a legitimate chance of making it to the Super Bowl. That’s in glaring contrast to MLB, where teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox with their massive payrolls that allow them to buy all the talent they need to win a championship. That leave fans like those of the Twins despairing when they have to face large-market teams in the playoffs and their pitchers have to face All Star after All Star up and down their lineups.
So there’s just as much as a reason why the Yankees and the Red Sox are always in the playoffs as there is that I always feel the Vikings have decent chance of making the playoffs year in and year out.