Because this is the third consecutive appearance of the New England Patriots under head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady and the fourth in five seasons and ninth for the Belichick–Brady head coach–quarterback tandem, many sports pundits and fans will proclaim the Patriots to be greatest of all time.
Brushing aside epic collapse of the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl 51 and Seattle head coach Pete Carroll's bonehead call to lose the game in Super Bowl 49, two Super Bowl games that Patriots could have lost, the Pats under Belichick–Brady have won four and lost four, including twice to teams of the New York Giants and notably at the end of one season with the Patriots fielded a team that went undefeated.
But this work is not about the on the field play of the NFL nor is it about the horrible anti-white stance racist NFL players have undertaken and which NFL owners support.
On Feb 1, 2019, Statista has published a work by Felix Richter titled Are Americans Losing Interest in the Super Bowl? In the work, Richter mentions the third straight year-over-year decline in average viewership as recorded by Nielsen.
But does merely looking at the total average viewership tell the true story?
So What is the True Story?
As I have written more than a few times here on the True Dollar Journal, without context, data means nothing. Merely looking at total average viewership tells nothing, in truth. Drawing a chart from it merely is an application of pseudo data science.
Peak popularity of the NFL and its Super Bowl happened decades ago. The glory days of the NFL happened between 1978 and 1986, and most notably between 1982 and 1986, when Joe Montana quarterbacked the San Francisco 49ers to Super Bowl wins over the Cincinnati Bengals and Miami Dolphins, when John Riggins of the Washington Redskins ran over the Miami Dolphins, when Marcus Allen of the Los Angeles Raiders, yes, the Los Angeles Raiders, ran over the Washington Redskins.
Peak viewership penetration, when most US residents watched the Super Bowl happened on January 26, 1986, when the sunglasses-wearing bad boy hot head Jim McMahon quarterbacked the Chicago Bears with their Monsters of Midway defense to victory over a team fielded by New England Patriots.
When looking at the trend deviation of viewer penetration to the average, the story holds. While the shape of the curve retains from above, what you can see is that each bounce up since the heyday of the NFL (1978-1986) has failed to match the previous high.
In an earlier work published on the True Dollar Journal, 2017 NFL TV VIEWERSHIP FALLS OVER PLAYER PROTESTS! IS NFL FANDOM AN ECONOMIC INDICATOR?, I pointed out two things:
- regular season NFL viewership is a proxy for how well US residents are doing with respect to the economy
- NFL attendance peaked around the time of Peak GDP as measured in True Dollars™ and plunged during the Greenspan-Bernanke Great Depression.
Viewership tracks the state of the economy. In bad times, viewership rises (1990 to 1993; 2007 to 2012). This should be no surprise. Adult Americans have less discretionary income in bad times. They stay home more. TV viewing is cheap.
It should also fail to surprise that in boom times, adults spend much more on entertainment away from the home. And of course, there never have been boom times like the ones created during the Greenspan-Bernanke Great Inflation, the greatest credit bubble in the history of mankind.
With significant demographic changes owing to unprecedented and unwarranted massive immigration, what does the future hold for the NFL? Back in those heyday NFL seasons between 1978 and 1986, 80 of every 100 US residents were white with nearly all being native born. Today, only 61 in 100 US residents are white.
Nearly 15 in 100 are foreign born. Shockingly, 27 of 100 in California are foreign-born.
Soccer seems to be the sport of the future for a good portion of the growing mestizo population and other foreign-born population of the USA. White youths seem to be turning from football and gravitating toward rugby, lacrosse and ice hockey.
Right now, the second season is under way for Major League Rugby. That competition has expanded to nine teams and league executives expect to expand to twelve teams by 2020.For more NFL articles on the True Dollar Journal, see here.
Oh and enjoy a cringeworthy moment as the 1986 Chicago Bears led by Jim McMahon performed a horrible rap song in the style of its time.
Gab It
