In college football, polls abound. There’s the Associated Press poll. The coaches’ assistants’ poll. Robots have polls. ALDLAND has one too. Wisconsin edged Ole Miss in last week’s poll, and this week’s poll has two new options. Cast your vote below.
Marcus and I are back to discuss the games we previewed last week, as well as talk about some of the exciting games on this weekend’s slate. Coaches on the hot seat and how hot those seats might be is another topic of discussion, as is our new favorite musical artist, “Mathers.”
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bpbrady and I were, in fact, at the football match between the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. There are so many things to say about this game so I guess I’ll jump right in.
Since “Monday Morning Quarterback” and “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” are taken and uninspired, and because I’m preempting my own exhaustion of “Monday“-themed alliterations, ALDLAND’s regular football/weekend roundup will move to Tuesday afternoons, which also permits incorporation of the Monday night NFL game. With week two of college football and week one of the NFL in the books, here goes:
College Football
Pregame:
- There’s still time to vote in ALDLAND’s week 1 college football poll. The week 2 poll will open soon.
- Brendan and Physguy were in Ann Arbor for ESPN College Gameday, and the only evidence is a couple cryptic tweets from Brendan.
The games — No surprises:
- I was able to find Michigan State’s game against South Florida on television in the Southeast, which may be thanks to USF’s participation in the game, but which also felt like finding a unicorn in the wild. MSU’s defense continues to outscore their offense, and that’s with three quarterbacks! Even Sparta only ever had two kings at once. Michigan State 21, South Florida 6.
- I also found Vanderbilt-Austin Peay on TV, which is a reminder that it’s week two for the broadcasters as well. VU had no problem with its Middle Tennessee neighbors, winning 38-3.
Even if it doesn’t pack as much action as baseball, or even tennis, there’s no denying that football is America’s de facto national pastime. Many point to the game’s amenability to television as the main reason for its ascension to this position, while some look to the work of labor leaders like Gene Upshaw, who led the charge for free agency, ultimately introducing a new era of NFL riches.
Those two factors undoubtedly contributed to the NFL’s rise in popularity, but I don’t think they explain why the NFL is as extremely popular as it is today, when every sport receives tailored television treatment, and the power balance between players and ownership across all major sports is far more even than it probably ever has been. If you step back far enough, football’s not much different than any of the other major sports. How does this otherwise undifferentiated product stay on top?
More than ever before, we’re living in an attention economy. Availability no longer determines value, because, as a result of the proliferation of communication technology, everything is equally available. When sports (and other broadcasted entertainment) are equally available and are available in such a volume that they cannot all be consumed, people must make decisions about which sports components they will follow and which ones the will not. Economics is about the allocation of limited resources, and in the market for sports entertainment, the only limited resource is our attention.
Why does the NFL grab more of the attention of more people than any other sport? Scarcity. Between the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL, no professional sports league plays fewer games than the NFL. Moreover, those games are scheduled such that, with minimal deviation, they all are played on the same day. Intentional scarcity makes NFL games both manageably consumable in the attention economy and appointment viewing. Scarcity flips the cost script: having a small number of games and coordinating them on a once-weekly basis means the cost of paying attention to them is low, and because missing one Sunday’s slate of games means missing a significant proportion of the season, not to mention being out of the conversational loop for a full week, the cost of not paying attention is high.
Intentional scarcity might seem like a counterintuitive strategy for boosting a product’s popularity, and the supplier’s revenues, but in a flooded market of generally undifferentiated products, it can be a very successful strategy for generating consumer demand.
Whether the NFL is consciously employing an intentional scarcity strategy is an open question– Roger Goodell’s ongoing push for an expanded season of eighteen games would seem to be contrary to that approach– but there is at least one market in which some manufacturers are openly pursuing an intentional scarcity strategy: the market for bourbon.
The bourbon market has all the essential elements of the sports entertainment market that make it susceptible to the successful pursuit of the intentional scarcity strategy: generally speaking, it is contained of undifferentiated products– competing in the bourbon market is similar to competing in NASCAR– that are present in such great volume that it is practically impossible to consume all of them, at least on a regular basis. The most famous exemplar of the scarcity approach is the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, but it certainly is not the only one.
Intentional scarcity can be a viable strategy for competing in a flooded market of generally undifferentiated products. Regardless of whether the NFL is intentionally engaging in this strategy, the approach is an important contributor to the league’s station atop the sporting world.
The New York Times has been flirting with Nashville for years, joining the charge of northern and coastal publications eager to tag Music City as America’s newly discovered “It City” with multiple travel-section features and other glowing profiles. They even utilized Vanderbilt basketball player Joe Duffy as a sports columnist during Duffy’s senior year.
All of this praise and proclamation certainly drew Nashville’s attention. A sudden object of affection rightly wants to know that its new, putative suitor’s interest is real, though, and a period of trouble or difficulty can provide a means of testing the authenticity of that interest. If the suitor’s interest is genuine, it will respond in a way that demonstrates true understanding or, at the very least, in a way that seeks to gain that understanding, so as best to further the relationship. If it responds by turning to cliches and shallow “conventional wisdom,” though, it suggests the interest was only ever skin-deep.
I’m not suggesting that the New York Times owes Nashville, or Vanderbilt University, any special degree of care or deference. That’s especially so where, as here, the issue is a rape allegation, and one that describes a single victim with multiple alleged perpetrators at that. (To say that rape is a topic beyond the scope of this website a) is true; b) is not to signal that it is a topic that people should not discuss; and c) is not to say that the integrity of a sports team as such is the more important issue here.)
I am suggesting that the New York Times owes Nashville and Vanderbilt University a duty of ordinary journalistic practices, which include researching stated assumptions instead of treating general stereotypes as established fact applicable to the matter at hand. I also am suggesting that the New York Times did not meet that standard in an article about Vanderbilt University’s football program it published today. (HT: Johnny Too Bad.)
Maybe he just always looks that way.
The NFL season begins tonight, when the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens travel to Denver to play the Broncos.
In 2013, NFL fans have so many ways to follow the game, it can be easy to lose track of the notion that this is all supposed to be leisure-time entertainment. The following are suggestions on how to cut through the volumes of NFL-fan-experience accessories and have fun this season: Continue reading
Polling dominates college football. Setting aside pure profit motives, everything that happens in college football is intended to improve a team’s ranking in “the polls.” The Associated Press has a poll. The “coaches” have a poll. Harris has a poll. Computers– including a computer named after the member of the J. Geils Band who served as the inspiration for the first face of theFacebook.com– have polls. In other words, everybody but ALDLAND has a college football poll. Until now.
Introducing college football’s newest poll, the ALDLAND poll. The ALDLAND poll is a clear voice for unassailable college football rankings. The voters are the subscribers, readers, listeners, lost googlers, and drive-by image-lifters of this website, and unlike most college football polls, which are bound to the singular mission of ranking the top teams in the country according to their on-field performance, the question this poll definitively answers likely will be different each week.
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Rafa Nadal currently has a 2-1 lead over Novak Djokovic in the first set of the men’s final of the U.S. Open. You can watch live 
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