↓ Archives ↓

The real NFL stats

The other day a political website overflowing with the typical hatred for the current president published a supposedly carefully analyzed essay that boasted the NFL is doing just fine, despite the NFL’s politicization and the current president’s subsequent criticisms of that politicization.

Though supposed to be a careful numbers analysis, the essay was full of personal invective against the president. It is a hint that the numbers argument is not strong enough to stand on its own.

This essay stated that current NFL advertising payments demonstrate the NFL is in full financial health; that there is no measurable financial result from the NFL’s politicization or the public disputes and discourteous behavior many of its employees have shown toward average Americans and the US president.

In short, the NFL is doing fine with the American people and President Trump has no traction.

It was the kind of article that I had to read three times over to ensure that the writer really meant what he wrote. And in fact, he did mean it, and yet it is just another example of how just about everything has been politicized, and how anything that can be politicized to score a point will beĀ  so used. Even if it is so obviously factually wrong.

Never mind that this week’s New Yorker magazine has a front cover showing a dead, bleeding Donald Trump at the bottom of an escalator. That is obvious bias and unhinged crazy (imagine if it had been the past president so portrayed). What is more intriguing is when someone reaches into a random numbers hat and tries to make a coherent argument, as the subject essay did, and pass it off as careful logic.

The problem with arguing that the NFL is doing great! fantastic! so there! based on current advertising payments is that those payments are not directly connected to actual league performance. Those ad numbers are heavily indexed and fixed long ago to past data and calculations of expected market performance. Long before Colin Kaepernick started his anti-America kneeling thing. Long before the NFL was politicized.

The cited NFL numbers are heavily lagged, meaning they reflect past, not present or even close to present performance. Also, these ad numbers are relative to other markers/ variables that are either unrelated to NFL performance or are fixed. This means they either cannot or likely will not change due to NFL performance for a long time. This means the market-driven financial fallout from the politicized NFL’s self-inflicted damage is yet to be tallied or measured by the sectors being cited by the essay (unless you are looking at short-term sales of NFL merchandise, which has been yo-yo-ing for the past two years, or half-empty NFL stadiums and unbelievably low game ticket sales, as one would expect as a result of the NFL’s politicization and purposeful alienation of at least half of America).

Using the advertising measures in that political essay in a logical way, an actual analysis in five years would be appropriate. That would catch the standard market-based reevaluation of the NFL’s actual performance. And that probably won’t be a happy situation; certainly nothing for political writers to crow about. I am willing to bet that the NFL will be in real trouble in five years, as a result of openly disrespecting their audience and market.

I conclude this by looking at the most telling, most relevant statistics: Low ticket sales, half-filled stadiums, NFL merchandise sales way down, measurable TV-broadcast NFL game viewership down.

But by then the essay in question will be long forgotten, because almost all such essays are done for their immediate effect. That is, they are trying to create an appearance, a narrative, with the simple goal of damaging and reducing the president’s current polling numbers among his supporters. Accuracy, facts, numbers do not matter. And no one else in the legacy media will call them out on their inaccuracy, anyhow.

Essays based on numbers written by politicos who are ignorant about numbers and markets are not really, truly, meant to persuade people that the numbers are meaningful. Rather, high-churn essays like this are simply meant to score temporary political points. Just like the vast majority of the US establishment legacy media. It is just another angle, that’s all.

No Comment

Be the first to respond!

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.