The Secret to the NFL's Success: Artificial Scarcity

More Ball, Please

I'm an NFL fan. I've been to games in over a half dozen cities, haven't missed a game from my favorite laundry in decades, even when they were hopeless (and they've been hopeless far too often, really). I think I've even seen all of their preseason games, have owned multiple jerseys and other pieces of clothing, have been to the Hall of Fame, and ran my own fantasy league for the better part of a decade. (Live single round auction keeper league, if that helps to establish my nerd cred for you.) I blog about sports for fun, and have picked every game against the spread, badly, for years.

And like every NFL fan, I am spending an extraordinary amount of time, as a fan, not watching football.

Let's take the actual telecasts themselves. By the clock, a regulation game is sixty minutes long, which is spread out over a little more than three hours of actual time. This is where you might want to rail about the incessant commercial breaks, but it's more than that, of course. There are delays for instant replays, timeouts, penalties and halftime. Even if there were, somehow, no commercial breaks in a game, it would not finish in less than two hours, and we know that from, well, watching the occasional high school game. 

But let's go further. According to a number of studies, the actual time that is taken up by game action is somewhere in the range of 11 to 12 minutes. The rest of the time is taken up by huddles and dead air, which is why, if you are like me, you find yourself developing special levels of distaste for various announcing teams. With only 16 guaranteed games a year, that means a little more than three hours of actual game for the year, and even if your club goes to the Super Bowl, it's all of four hours. Compare this to MLB (over 50 hours of game play), the NBA (over 65) or NHL (over 82), and suddenly, the comparative ratings of the different leagues makes a lot more sense. Even if you don't want to go off the actual game time, just comparing the season lengths means that one NFL game is worth 5 NBA or NHL games, or 10 MLB games. Missing an NFL game is, to many fans, inconceivable. Missing an NBA, NHL or MLB game is, well, routine.

Would NFL ratings really go down if there was, say, not just more teams and a longer season, but an entire second league? Probably not, actually. The USFL, the last major rival pro league in the U.S., was shown on ESPN and ABC in the 1980s, and routinely pulled in better ratings than MLB in the spring season. College football does great ratings as well, especially when it's a playoff game. (And sure, Arena Football and the Canadian league also exists and don't rival the ratings, but the rules are different and the teams might not be local. Different world. There's even a women's league that dresses the players in, well, best not discussed.)

If pro football were a true marketplace, rather than an artificial monopoly, there would be more than one league, in more than one season. It would be more like, well, what the rest of the world calls football, with the best teams from lesser leagues moving up, and the worst teams moving down. There wouldn't be eight months a year where fans of the sport watch other sports, all the while more or less wishing they were watching football, or watching meta football events like the draft, scouting combine, or free agent signings. (NFL fans would talk about how there wouldn't be enough quarterbacks to make for watchable games, but that's a red herring. What makes bad QB play difficult to watch is the gulf between the best and the worst, which is why every non-NFL football fan is fine with their game.)

No one I know is clamoring for NFL2, ready for a second fantasy league, or would immediately flip their team allegiance for new laundry in new locations. But if the rules were the same, and franchises were promoted or relegated, they would care very, very quickly... and we'd also end the blackmail game that franchises can play against local governments for stadium concessions. 

It will probably never happen; too many NFL owners are way too happy with the way things are, and the league isn't exactly hurting for money. But I do know this: markets that profit from artificial scarcity do not get to enjoy that scarcity forever. Especially when there's this much money at stake, and television networks that are desperate for live programming that pulls in big ratings.

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