Americans will lap up any NFL quasi-derivative substance Roger Goodell and "the Shield" give us. You would think we reached peak market saturation when Rog rolled out a pro bowl fantasy draft that was as long as the actual Super Bowl. Negative, we were still able to mine that mess for Philip Rivers facial expression GIFs, just like any Charger playoff game in January.
It was a matter of time before a billionaire from a rival sports league popped off on the NFL's increasing hegemony. And fortunately for America, that whiny Rain Maker was NBA Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban:
"I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion," Cuban said Sunday evening when his pregame conversation with reporters, which covered a broad range of topics, swayed toward football. "I'm just telling you, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they're getting hoggy. Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way.
And:
"They're trying to take over every night of TV," Cuban said. "Initially, it'll be, 'Yeah, they're the biggest-rating thing that there is.' OK, Thursday, that's great, regardless of whether it impacts [the NBA] during that period when we cross over. Then if it gets Saturday, now you're impacting colleges. Now it's on four days a week.
I said the country is better for Cuban popping off, because only Cubes would equate the NFL to fat pigs. Did he learn his insults from Alec Baldwin?
I think Cuban is jumping the gun here. Yes, Cuban is a successful businessman, but this comes off as sour grapes. The NBA could only dream of having the type of social capital the NFL has. The NBA exhausted any goodwill it had with the American people when they let MJ play for the Wizards.
Gregg Easterbrook made a similar point about the NFL in his book, "King of Sports." Easterbrook talked about the player safety angle rather than Cuban’s business angle. As ESPN’s Kevin Seifert has pointed out, there’s no hard data proving Americans have had their fill of pro football.
As it turned out, the numbers evened out over the course of the season. Our visual and anecdotal impressions might have told us one thing, but the job of documenting poor play on Thursday nights proved difficult. Ratings for those games set an NFL Network record, and the league sold a portion of their 2014 broadcast rights to CBS for about $275 million, according to the Sports Business Journal. The package includes 14 Thursday night games and a Saturday doubleheader in Week 16.
In fact, professional football is the sole industry to have improved in the eyes of the American public in our age of the 24-hour news cycle. The public won't be responsible for any fall of professional football. It will be the NFL's own doing.
College football is a cash cow for the NFL because it stands separately from the pro game as a sport while concurrently acting as an unofficial farm system. Forcing people to choose between their favorite college and pro teams would be eating into the NFL's own profits. The separate audiences for college fans and pro fans are significantly smaller than the audience for both.
Cuban doesn’t connect the dots, but the biggest threat to the NFL's Russia-like expansion into weeknight network television is the at-home experience. We can thank noted Obamacare critic Jon Taffer for NFL Sunday Ticket, the Shield's weekly March Madness-esque experience. If the NFL ever dared to program on Wednesdays, Fridays, or Saturdays, they'd only decrease the value of the only legal form of crack cocaine this country has.
As we saw in Green Bay, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati in January, the luxury experience at home is already eating into the fan experience. The financial and physical capital fans invest to attend a pro football game are too high. It's a question whether fans will want to sink that type of investment for a Wednesday night game, considering there's evidence already that there's apprehension from attending crummy playoff games.
The NFL is king. But it also needs to remember the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."