(Bloomberg) — Football became America’s favorite sport 42 years ago this month when a Gallup Inc. poll for the first time said the game was more popular than baseball. The NFL is retaining the title amid criticism of its domestic-abuse policy.
Seven weeks into a National Football League season marked by women’s groups calling for Commissioner Roger Goodell’s firing, the NFL has avoided the stigma Major League Baseball suffered from its steroids scandal. Television ratings are up, and the league won a new $12 billion DirecTV deal three weeks ago.
With football’s mastery of that medium, aided by fans’ attachment to fantasy sports and gambling, analysts of the game say it will take more to slow the NFL’s rise than video of Ray Rice knocking out his future wife in a casino elevator.
“It’s really quite remarkable,” said Richard Crepeau, author of “NFL Football: History of America’s New Pastime.” “There would have to be a whole series of startling revelations about cover-ups and massive involvement of players, executives and everyone else. A massive sort of thing.”
Gallup’s most recent sports interest poll, in June 2013, found football to be the favorite sport of 39 percent of Americans. Baseball was second at 14 percent and basketball third at 12 percent. In 1972, football led 32-24 percent. Baseball led in 1960, 34-21 percent.
Rice, a three-time Pro Bowl running back, was cut by the Baltimore Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the NFL on Sept. 8 after video of him punching his then-fiancee Janay Palmer at the Revel Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was posted on the website TMZ.com. Rice had been banned two games by Goodell after earlier footage only showed him dragging the unconscious Palmer from the elevator.
Goodell’s Job
As the National Organization for Women joined other groups calling for Goodell’s ouster, 2012 league Most Valuable Player Adrian Peterson was indicted on child-abuse charges for allegedly beating his 4-year-old son with a thin branch or switch, while three other cases of domestic abuse among NFL players were scrutinized.
Goodell said the league initially erred in the Rice case and pledged to remake the NFL’s personal conduct policy by the Super Bowl in February. He also asked former FBI Director Robert Mueller to conduct an external review of the league’s handling of the case.
TV viewership this season has demonstrated the NFL’s durability through more than a month of negative publicity. The league had the 12 most-viewed programs on network television from Sept. 1 through Oct. 15, according to Nielsen data. The average rating, or the percentage of homes tuned into games, through Week 6 this season was up 6 percent over the same period in 2013.
Compelling Product
“The product on the field is still compelling, so I’m not surprised at all,” New York Giants owner John Mara told reporters at league owners’ meetings in New York on Oct. 8.
Goodell, 55, became commissioner in September 2006. Less than two months later, former NFL safety Andre Waters committed suicide at age 44. Since his death, later linked to brain damage from playing football, the risk of head trauma has become an issue at every level of sports. The NFL was sued by about 5,000 players for damages due to head injuries and is working toward completing an almost $1 billion settlement.
Though the crisis has run concurrently with Goodell’s tenure, it hasn’t stopped league revenue from rising 67 percent to about $10 billion a year since he took office. Fans seem more than willing to look past the possibility that the NFL willfully ignored player health issues for decades, a central claim of player lawsuits against the league.
Baseball Steroids
The public showed more outrage toward baseball’s so-called steroid era, leading to highly publicized congressional hearings, criminal cases against players such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, and debate about the sport and its stars’ accomplishments. After a report in 2007 by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell that disclosed widespread use and acceptance of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, a Gallup poll showed that most fans wanted players punished — even though the report recommended against it because of the pervasiveness of it at the time.
In the end, baseball developed a drug-testing program that now calls for an 80-game ban for a first-time steroids offender, half the season. Football players caught taking steroids get suspended for four games, 25 percent of the season, for a first offense. Performance-enhancing drug use has defined the baseball careers of Most Valuable Player award winners such as Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Doping suspensions of football players typically wind up as a footnote on their resumes.
‘Emotional Attachment’
“There are some kind of emotional attachments that make the country much more sensitive to what goes on in baseball,” said Crepeau, a history professor at University of Central Florida in Orlando, linking it to America’s puritanical past. “Football never got hooked into that. Why is that? I’m not sure.”
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy and MLB spokesman Pat Courtney declined requests for comment.
Founded in 1920, the NFL owes its ascension in part to former league Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who in 1960 moved the league’s office to New York, near Madison Avenue’s ad agencies and network broadcasters, from the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, according to Crepeau. A graph showing the growth of NFL fan support would look similar to one showing the increase in TVs, Crepeau said in a telephone interview.
Television Advantage
“The NFL has been brilliant in terms of its embracing and exploiting of television,” Crepeau said. “Baseball essentially feared television.”
The NFL, America’s richest sports league, had $9.7 billion in revenue in 2013, while MLB, founded in 1876, had $8 billion. The NFL on Oct. 1 announced a $12 billion, eight-year agreement with DirecTV.
Rick Burton, the former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee, agreed that “baseball didn’t figure out TV as well as football,” which also has taken advantage of its product’s scarcity.
Burton, former commissioner of the Sydney-based National Basketball League, said in many countries, such as Australia, “the football code dominates.” In America, people identify themselves by which NFL team they support, he said.
Life Escape
“I don’t know if it’s tied to the violence of the game, that there are things that happen in a football game that can’t happen in day-to-day life: the tackling, hitting and acrobatics,” Burton, a sports management professor at Syracuse University, said in a telephone interview. “And then you add in gambling, and you add in fantasy and you have people who are very passionate.”
Nevada sports books took in $1.6 billion in college and pro football wagers last year, up 18.1 percent from 2012, according to the state’s gaming control board. That’s almost triple the $680.8 million in baseball bets in 2013, down 3.4 percent from a year earlier. Nevada makes up less than 1 percent of the overall football betting market, according to RJ Bell, who runs betting information website Pregame.com.
“While the NFL continues to say it doesn’t like legal gambling, they would be really upset if gambling disappeared,” Crepeau said.
Fantasy Football
As for fantasy sports, a legal form of betting on players based on their statistics rather than the outcome of games, there were 13.7 million fantasy football players and 5.9 million fantasy baseball players in the U.S. and Canada in 2007, according to Fantasy Sports Trade Association data. Seven years later, 32 million people are playing fantasy football and 13.7 million playing fantasy baseball.
Fantasy football has created leaguewide fans where once rooting interests were more parochial, New England Patriots President Jonathan Kraft said earlier this month at the Bloomberg Boston Sports Forum.
“That’s one of the reasons over the last decade you’ve seen the ratings for the NFL continue to grow when everything else is shrinking,” Kraft said.
It also shows a “perfect contrast” between the way the NFL and MLB have approached innovation, said Crepeau.
“The NFL embraced fantasy immediately,” Crepeau said. “What did baseball do? They sued people who were running fantasy leagues for stealing their statistics. How dumb was that?”
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