Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-10-06 9:30AM New York Jets @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Buffalo Bills @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Carolina Panthers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Cleveland Browns @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Indianapolis Colts @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Miami Dolphins @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Arizona Cardinals @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM Green Bay Packers @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM New York Giants @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-10-06 8:20PM Dallas Cowboys @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Mon 2024-10-07 8:15PM New Orleans Saints @ Kansas City Chiefs
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Notes -
You’ve ignored nearly all my points, so I will simplify them for you.
Why do you think people watch current NFL games, and would not view older NFL games if they were less expensive? Is it based on the content of the product, or is it based on the manufactured hype around the product? If it is based on the manufactured hype around the product, to what extent do you think this hype is due to the astroturfed (pun intended) millions or hundreds of millions in making NFL appear socially relevant on social media and TV? If the consumers understood that the hype is fictitious, do you think they would still watch as much?
If I hire people to show up at my storefront and loudly proclaim how important my product is, while pretending to be legitimate, in order to bring in passersby, would you consider this “trickery”, or just “satisfying the appetite for leisure and discretionary spending”?
Why do you think Adidas spent one billion dollars for Messi? Does Messi affect the quality of Adidas sneakers? Do you think a rational consumer making rational choices would pick a shoe because it has the name “Messi” attached to it? Or is Adidas instead manipulating the purchasing habits of irrational children and low IQ adults?
Why have many people, myself included, attended more than one performance of Die Zauberflöte when the Met Opera and Medici.TV have prior performances available for streaming?
The leap to an F6 in Der Hölle Rache is challenging even for professional sopranos. Elite performance witnessed live is thrilling, as the possibility of failure adds to the stakes.
Your comparison isn’t accurate. A real life performance of the Magic Flute is a multisensory experience with superior aural sensation, among other things. I am not asking why someone would see a live NFL game. I am asking why the overwhelming number of NFL viewers never buy old “episodes”, but instead only watch the latest installment. If you are into classical music, you would actually do the opposite. You would determine which performance of the Magic Flute is the greatest and then buy a high-quality record of that. Recent performances of classical music are not favored due to their recency among classical music listeners. The most listened-to performances are years if not decades old, and even in the guitar world the recordings of Segovia and Bream are given special attention despite the poor audio quality. Same when television: lots of people want to see which show is the best, even if that’s 90s Twin Peaks or 00s Friends. This is despite the improvements in film technology.
The reason the average nfl viewer only watches current episodes is that the NFL markets itself as relevant, spending enormous sums to make people think it is relevant. It’s like an attentional pyramid scheme. When people realize there is no reason for it to be relevant, that they were lied to, the industry will fail. They protect against this by claiming they are “tradition” and an “American staple” instead of garbage.
But continued live performance has led to continual innovation. The NFL is live action chess. There are coaching family trees tied to different systems/concepts. Systems have shelf lives as there is perpetual innovation and counter innovation.
Does the average NFL fan have the knowledge-base to appreciate these “continued innovations”, implying that the average fan has the coaching expertise of not just the top coaches but the innovators as well? This implies that the average NFL fan is reading detailed analytic write-ups about different coaching strategies, being their true interest, right?
You present your argument in a bunch of binaries. If there are additional reasons to see live opera, then suspense inherit to live performances doesn’t matter, apparently.
And if the average NFL fan does know the general difference between power and zone run blocking schemes, knows what an RPO and a zero blitz are, and can differentiate between cover two and single high, still, the league’s ongoing tactical evolution is of no interest to them unless they can explain why mesh and four verts are the building blocks of an air raid? They need to be able to diagram jump calls in a cover four or an ever evolving league is of no interest to them?
I suspect many people, absent a solid grounding in Schenkerian analysis, can still find the aesthetic contrast between Bach and Beethoven of interest. Just as the average NFL fan has a general appreciation for the contrast between a Harbaugh/Roman offense and a Kevin O’Connell offense.
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Because, contra your claims above, current NFL games are a source of civic engagement, discourse, and philosophy. Of note, people do watch older games. The other day, I went back and watched a fun Bills-Patriots playoff game while I was cycling on Zwift. NFL Network televises old games that people watch. The advantages to real-time developments are that it's all happening live, we're engaged with something as a community of viewers, and there are few shared experiences in the modern world.
Yes. In the area where I do buy expensive sports products (running shoes), I can observe that the best runners in the world wear a couple specific shoes - if it were possible to run faster and win prizes wearing something else, they would do so (or at least a few would). I can be confident that the shoes on the feet of the guys running 2:03 marathons really are as good as it gets.
Moreover, "rational" doesn't mean that someone doesn't enjoy aesthetics, in-group symbols, and branding. You might as well suggest that someone that's truly rational wouldn't prefer a green shoe to a blue shoe when they're otherwise identical.
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Not the OP, but to answer your questions:
First, there are people such as myself who will watch older NFL games because we want to see how the game evolved and because we like to reminisce, but that's obviously not the majority of people. The reason most people don't have any interest in watching older NFL games is because of the inherent drama of a live event. If a game starts at 1 pm, few people who can't watch it then are going to tape it to watch later (and those who do are the kind of people who will watch a rebroadcast of Super Bowl XXVI if they catch it on TV). For most people, watching older sports broadcasts is like watching random episodes of World News Tonight from the 1970s; it may be entertaining but what originally made it compelling is irrelevant. If you think this is due to hype, I'll pose this question: If this Sunday, the NFL played all of its normal games, but put the entire week's promotion budget toward Tuesday Night Prime-Time reairs of the games from Week 5 of the 2018 season, which games do you think would get higher ratings? Would hype alone lead more people in Pittsburgh to watch Steelers–Falcons from 6 years ago as opposed to their current matchup with the Cowboys?
It depends on whether the customer liked the product. If it's a good product then they'll feel that their appetite for leisure and discretionary spending has been satisfied. If it's a bad product, they may feel they've been tricked. But if their appetite isn't satisfied then they probably won't buy the product again, and certainly wouldn't buy it again repeatedly. If the average NFL viewer felt he'd been tricked, the league would have gone out of business a long time ago. You act as though people watch football games and are disappointed at the end, but nonetheless fall for the hype week after week.
Adidas makes athletic shoes. Messi is one of the greatest athletes in the world. It is rational for me to assume he wouldn't endorse a shoddy product. If you were offered two bicycles by manufacturers you hadn't heard of, and your only information was that one model was used in the Tour de France and the other one wasn't, which one would it be more rational to assume is better?
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