\n(Bloomberg) \u2014 Football became America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tSeven weeks into a National Football League season marked by women\u2019s groups calling for Commissioner Roger Goodell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tWith football\u2019s mastery of that medium, aided by fans\u2019 attachment to fantasy sports and gambling, analysts of the game say it will take more to slow the NFL\u2019s rise than video of Ray Rice knocking out his future wife in a casino elevator.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt\u2019s really quite remarkable,\u201d said Richard Crepeau, author of \u201cNFL Football: History of America\u2019s New Pastime.\u201d \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tGallup\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tRice, 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.<\/p>\n
\tGoodell\u2019s Job<\/p>\n
\tAs the National Organization for Women joined other groups calling for Goodell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tGoodell said the league initially erred in the Rice case and pledged to remake the NFL\u2019s 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\u2019s handling of the case.<\/p>\n
\tTV viewership this season has demonstrated the NFL\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tCompelling Product<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThe product on the field is still compelling, so I\u2019m not surprised at all,\u201d New York Giants owner John Mara told reporters at league owners\u2019 meetings in New York on Oct. 8.<\/p>\n
\tGoodell, 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.<\/p>\n
\tThough the crisis has run concurrently with Goodell\u2019s tenure, it hasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\tBaseball Steroids<\/p>\n
\tThe public showed more outrage toward baseball\u2019s 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\u2019 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 \u2014 even though the report recommended against it because of the pervasiveness of it at the time.<\/p>\n
\tIn 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.<\/p>\n
\t\u2018Emotional Attachment\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThere are some kind of emotional attachments that make the country much more sensitive to what goes on in baseball,\u201d said Crepeau, a history professor at University of Central Florida in Orlando, linking it to America\u2019s puritanical past. \u201cFootball never got hooked into that. Why is that? I\u2019m not sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tNFL spokesman Brian McCarthy and MLB spokesman Pat Courtney declined requests for comment.<\/p>\n
\tFounded in 1920, the NFL owes its ascension in part to former league Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who in 1960 moved the league\u2019s office to New York, near Madison Avenue\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tTelevision Advantage<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThe NFL has been brilliant in terms of its embracing and exploiting of television,\u201d Crepeau said. \u201cBaseball essentially feared television.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe NFL, America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\tRick Burton, the former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee, agreed that \u201cbaseball didn\u2019t figure out TV as well as football,\u201d which also has taken advantage of its product\u2019s scarcity.<\/p>\n
\tBurton, former commissioner of the Sydney-based National Basketball League, said in many countries, such as Australia, \u201cthe football code dominates.\u201d In America, people identify themselves by which NFL team they support, he said.<\/p>\n
\tLife Escape<\/p>\n
\t\u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s tied to the violence of the game, that there are things that happen in a football game that can\u2019t happen in day-to-day life: the tackling, hitting and acrobatics,\u201d Burton, a sports management professor at Syracuse University, said in a telephone interview. \u201cAnd then you add in gambling, and you add in fantasy and you have people who are very passionate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tNevada 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\u2019s gaming control board. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWhile the NFL continues to say it doesn\u2019t like legal gambling, they would be really upset if gambling disappeared,\u201d Crepeau said.<\/p>\n
\tFantasy Football<\/p>\n
\tAs 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.<\/p>\n
\tFantasy 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.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThat\u2019s one of the reasons over the last decade you\u2019ve seen the ratings for the NFL continue to grow when everything else is shrinking,\u201d Kraft said.<\/p>\n
\tIt also shows a \u201cperfect contrast\u201d between the way the NFL and MLB have approached innovation, said Crepeau.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThe NFL embraced fantasy immediately,\u201d Crepeau said. \u201cWhat did baseball do? They sued people who were running fantasy leagues for stealing their statistics. How dumb was that?\u201d<\/p>\n
No replies were posted for this topic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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