Saturation

The one sport that most of the country seems to get behind is football.  From high school (or younger) to college to professional, there is a cult of football fandom.  I enjoy watching a game or two over the weekend when a team I follow is on television.  I do not find myself clearing my entire weekend schedule to sit and watch games from noon to ten at night.  I am guilty of throwing on a game just because there is nothing else on, if for no other reason than to have background noise and to kinda zone out for a while.  However, there is just too much football.  Even high school football is televised from time to time.  Why?  Why is this happening? 

Looking at this week, there have been games on television from Sunday to today (Wednesday).  Tomorrow as well.  And Friday.  Then again on Saturday.  And we find ourselves back to next Sunday.  Seven days of football.  Granted all these games are not big name professional teams or big conference games but there are still games on television.  And I'm not talking about some local channel that you can get only in the college towns, these are games that are on national television.  Did I watch a little bit of football this week?  Yes I did.  It wasn't more than maybe an hour.  

There are plenty of people that point to things like player protests as to television viewership in the NFL being down this year, but that isn't it.  Those who hate the players for using their platform to protest injustice are more than happy to tell you that they stopped watching and that is the reason viewership is down.  But that isn't the reason.  The reason is that there is too much of it.  It isn't special anymore.  When you saturate the market with your product it no longer has the draw it once had.  One of the main things that people point to as to why they don't watch baseball is that there are so many games.  One hundred and sixty two games is a lot of games to watch.  As an avid baseball fan, I even have trouble keeping my interest up in the middle of July.  Football only has sixteen games so there is less product to consume for your favorite team so when your team is on, you want to tune in.   

Even football players think there are too many games.  There is more and more complaints about the Thursday night games that have become prominent.  It use to be Thanksgiving was really the only Thursday games.  The issue that players are starting to point to is the short week between games.  Instead of Sunday (or Monday) to Sunday, there are times when you go from Sunday to Thursday.  With the physical toll that each game takes on these players they need the rest and recovery.  Especially with the concussion concerns for all the players, why wouldn't those in football want to protect their product?  Remember a few years ago that there was a big push to move the regular season to eighteen games?  Everyone was all for it.  I'm sure if you asked the players, they wouldn't have had the same feelings as the guy sitting on his couch in Pennsylvania eating a bag of chips and getting wasted.