Football is by far the most popular sport in America. It’s the offseason, and it still gets a lot of coverage on EPSN. Peyton Manning is just one football player, but hours or radio and TV airtime are dedicated to where he is going to go. (Today we think it’s the Arizona Cardinals. Tomorrow we’ll think somewhere else.) Mean while other sports like soccer and hockey almost never get mentioned. It’s a far distance between 1st and 4th in the world of sports.
The reason that I’m even thinking about this is that it’s soccer season in America. The MLS started a week ago with almost no coverage. Meanwhile Peyton Manning’s press conference from Indy was carried live not just on ESPN, but on real news channels like CNN. The divide between the coverage of these two sports is enormous.
Football is a great sport, and people love to bet on it. The Super Bowl is the most heavily bet game every year. It’s the monster game that one other game in any other sport can compete with. The next closest game would probably be the FIFA World Cup final which is watched and bet on by millions around the world. But this game is once every 4 years while the Super Bowl is played every February. That’s how huge the Super Bowl really is.
Football is so popular that fantasy football is a separate industry in itself. There are tons of sites and magazines dedicated to just fantasy football. And it’s actually cool to play fantasy football, which is amazing. This is a game that was started by stats nerds 20 years ago. I think fantasy sports actually started with baseball. Anyway, it was all about reading over stats to determine which players where better than others, and it kind of evolved into a game by guys who were really into stats.
OF course now with computers it’s a lot easier to play fantasy sports, but it’s still at its core a math heavy game based on stats. It’s perfect for people who are really into baseball, and I guess it’s good for people who are into football and love to gamble. Because fantasy football can be a huge gamble and involves a lot of luck.
You can have the perfect draft every year, but if your 1st and 2nd round draft picks get injured, your season is pretty much over. And in a violent sport like football, it’s not too farfetched to think that you can lose your first to picks to injury. People get injured all the time. Just look at Peyton Manning.
And we’ve now come full circle, so I think we’ll leave it at that. Thanks for reading during the boring offseason. If you continue to stop by, we’ll continue to write. See you soon!
