Quote:
Originally Posted by logan5
The average national tv audience for a Canucks game on CBC is 893 000.(from Canucks.com) The average national tv audience for a Lions game on TSN is 884 000.(from Ullrich article)
Does this mean that the Lions are as popular as the Canucks? No. It means that the Lions audience is concentrated into 18 regular season games vs the Canucks 82 vs the Whitecaps 36.
So a fairer comparison would be to pro rate the Lions audience over a 36 game schedule, which would cut the Lions numbers in half.
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That's silly. If we used such logic, we would have to conclude that the NHL is about as popular in the United States as the NFL, which only has 16 games per season.
Your notion of "pro rating" a season (just like your notion of counting total attendance instead of
average attendance) has no validity when comparing an 18-game season with a 36-game season. One of the biggest complaints of many football fans is that there are not more games. Your premise that attendance and viewership would decline if 18 more games were mixed into the season is preposterous. Doubling the amount of games is likely to be met with great enthusiasm by football fans, not less interest.
Why then don't professional football leagues have more than 16 or 18 games per season?
Two reasons:
1) Unlike soccer and hockey, which consist mainly of free-flowing spontaneous play, football consists almost entirely of rehearsed set-plays tailored to a specific opponent. During a game, a football team probably executes a hundred different, very complicated set plays specifically designed to fool the particular team they are playing. To prepare for a game, each player must spend hours and hours studying his playbook (which is a highly technical manual that consist of hundreds of pages), watching detailed game film of the next opponent, and rehearsing all the set plays on the practice field. This level of preparation takes about a week. Simply put, it is not feasible to play more than one game per week.
2) The exceptionally violent nature of football creates too much attrition through serious injuries to play more games per season. As it is, most professional football players lead debilitated lives once their careers are over and suffer higher rates of premature dimentia due to frequent head trauma.
What the closeness of the BC Lions' ratings to the Canucks' ratings likely shows us is that the BC Lions have become a much closer second to the Canucks (in terms of fan base) than we realized.