Last Thursday, an estimated 15.4 million households watch the New York Jets square off against the Buffalo Bills on Thursday Night Football. A few nights earlier on Sunday Night Baseball, the New York Mets and Washington Nationals – two of baseball’s teams in the hunt for the World Series – drew the attention of less than 1 million T.V. boxes.
So, why is this?
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Well, for one, more of the country would rather watch a primetime NFL game instead of a primetime MLB game – that’s just a known fact. But this isn’t just a one-time thing. For the past decade, NFL games routinely have beaten MLB games – even MLB postseason contests.
This has a large part to do with football’s marketing strategies towards fans. Pay attention to the commercials, promotions or coverage next time you watch ESPN, or any major sports network, for that matter.
No matter how poor the quality of the game may be, there will always be a slew of hype surrounding the week’s NFL games.
Additionally, football receives an astonishing amount of coverage on the internet. How easy is it to log onto a general news website, such as CNN, and see football headlines?
Baseball headlines on a site are very sporadic, and almost never catch the reader’s attention quite the way a football article will. So, naturally, somebody surfing the web will see football headlines everywhere they go and have football on their mind.
Even an MLB game with enormous playoff implications, such as Red Sox versus Yankees, will not receive the headlines, commercials and coverage that an average, albeit big market, NFL game will receive.
Maybe it has to do with the average sports fan not wanting to sit down for three hours and watch a baseball game featuring players they’ve never heard of before, or a game that doesn’t include the players on their coveted fantasy team. Baseball is just not America’s most popular sport.
In America, football is king, and Thursday night was a perfect example of that.
