September 27, 2017

Is Politics Killing the NFL?

I should say right off that I don’t know the answer to this question. It’s been an issue for the past couple of years, gaining momentum in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick’s protest coincided with the tapering off of TV ratings for the NFL. The problem is that ratings are a terrible way to judge league performance. Maybe it’s boring games. Maybe it’s weak teams in big markets. Who knows? It’s especially a problem because ratings are down for all the major sports leagues. Ratings are also down for ESPN. Hell, ratings are down for TV, period.

I was pondering this a couple of days ago, trying to think of a better way to measure the NFL’s popularity. I gave up on ratings pretty quickly. There’s no question that the league and the owners care about ratings, but it’s a rat’s nest. So what better measures exist?

A reasonable proxy might be the average value of a team franchise. This has issues too—small sample size, contested estimates, and the propensity of billionaires to buy teams for noneconomic reasons—but it’s still probably not bad. Any good capitalist recognizes that price signals incorporate all information about the value of a product, and that should work for sports teams too. The National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University provides estimates since 2000, but we’re mostly interested in more recent valuations. So here they are for the past five years:

Basketball’s impressive performance is mostly due to Steve Ballmer’s astonishing $2 billion purchase of the LA Clippers in 2014 after Donald Sterling was forced out of the league following the leak of racist remarks.

Baseball and football have roughly the same performance, with average team value more than doubling in the past five years. Hockey brings up the rear.

If this is meaningful, it suggests that the NFL is doing fine. Team value has been rising pretty steadily, with no evident slowdown in the past couple of years. In terms of growth, they trail only the NBA, and not by that much if you discount the Ballmer outlier. Obviously this could change, and it’s plausible that inertia might keep team values high for a while even after ratings and popularity have peaked. Tentatively, though, I’d suggest the NFL hasn’t been hurt much by politics so far.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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