Review: Channel Media and Market Survey on Boston Sports

38% have attended a Patriots game in person?

That cannot be right.

Also: Gerry Calahan #2 favorite sports personality? WTF totally unlistenable shit. I think I found the problem here.

 

Read it. Undoubtedly, there is an excellent sample size (4,000+). Distribution among married and single people was almost 50/50. For the most part, we are white and educated. 70% of those questioned were male. No surprises there.

However, there are a number of answers that had me scratching my head:

1. The areas of improvement that were identified were spot on, but the percentages of people that found these areas were incredibly low (<20%)
2. Over the last 5 years, out of almost 4,000 respondents, 87% thought the Revs were getting better or not declining.
3. Almost 2/3 of respondents thought Gillette was good or excellent for Revs games.
4. Over 60% thought they were focused on winning a championship.
5. More than half thought the team was capable of making good decisions.
6. Over 50% thought they were capable of getting talented players.
7. Over 50% thought they were capable of being competitive in the league.

I don't know the mindset of the respondents, or how many were STHs (other than it was 2% of those surveyed), but if the Revs see this, I question how motivated they will be to act when they now have independently gathered empirical data that doesn't necessarily cry out for wholescale changes.

 

Same old Revs.

 

49% of respondents are employed full time. 38% went to a Patriots game. Which free tickets were those?

Then again, the household income is WAY above the median for this region. There is some kind of selection bias here, unless sports fans are predominantly affluent beyond reason.

 

I think the part that will surprise some people(not me thou) is that the Red Sox are not #1 in this market. I wonder how that will sit over at Yawkey Way. I actually think most of this survey falls in line from what I have gathered on different sports message boards and attending game.

I think the only Sports ownership group that is going to be upset about this is FSG. Shows that the Red Sox have lost major ground on the Pats and TV ratings bear that out.

 

Pats tickets are not that hard to come by. And yes people spend money they don't have on sports tickets. How does that surprise you?

 

Baseball in general is declining in popularity. There's more competition in the sports entertainment market. I think MLB just asks too much of fans with games every night.

It takes 5 hours a week to follow an NFL team (2 if you have a DVR). If you want to adequately follow an MLB team, it takes twice as long (up to four times as long if you really want to catch every game). In a market where most people have their eyes on three or four different sports, its just really hard to follow the MLB.

 

Yeah, it is like asking how many people have been to Wendy's in the last three days and only sending the survey to fat people. It may not give accurate numbers for the general population, but serious fast food customers will educate us on which burger joints are trending upward.

 

Even though the Pats started improving in the mid 90's and their dynasty started forming in 2001, this was still a baseball town through 2007 or so. At least in my opinion. Sure people will always turn to attendance numbers and TV ratings/viewership, but that's just the nature of a 16 game football season versus a 162 game baseball season. The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry from 2003-2007 and the great playoff games over that time period captured the interest of more people than the Patriots' near perfect season IMO.

As much as I agree that this is a football town now and that the Sox are on the back burner, I'm left wondering how different things will be for the Patriots when Brady and Belichick inevitably retire. Just as the early to mid 2000s was the apex of interest for the Red Sox, one could argue the same thing about the current Patriots. The counter argument to that would be that the NFL is currently the biggest professional sports league on a national basis while MLB is dwindling, so regardless of the Patriots performance people will still remain interested in the product.

That being said, I don't really know which team will be the most popular five to ten years from now. However, I think it will be very interesting to see if the Red Sox can recover and whether or not the Patriots can continue to grow/at least maintain the current level of interest.

 

Students and retirees don't go to Pats games?

Also, when I went to a few games in the mid 80's, most Pats fans didn't smell like they could hold down a full time job.

 

They are and besides the obvious winning brings demand and higher prices. It also has a little to do with the fact the Jacobs and Kraft did build their stadiums with their own money. Red Sox because they can and have the sixth smallest park in MLB. Celtics because they don't own the stadium nor concessions.

 

I'm not surprised that the NFL is popular, it is. I'm not surprised people would sit down and watch a football game (even though I would not), I am surprised that people will sit in hours of traffic and pay crazy prices to watch it in person, and that somehow that number is higher than the number who will sit in hours of traffic and pay crazy prices to go to Fenway...

80x30k=2.4m
8x60k=0.5m

Doesn't add up.

 

While watching football in person isn't nearly as enjoyable as watching from your couch, the tailgating and gameday experience is something that attracts fans.

 

Before they formatted games to match the advertisement vehicle the Super Bowl had become, NFL games were a blast to watch live. Instant replay had a lot to do with that, too.

 

What doesn't add up? That people went to a popular sports team? Like I said before I see people selling tickets on facebook/twitter/craigslist all the time. Look at Stub Hub crap load of tickets available. People get tickets from work/friends. When it comes to sports all lot of people use their entertainment dollars to go to live games.

 

What doesn't add up is that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5million gameday tickets available to the Red Sox each year, and there are about half a million in-season gameday home tickets available for the Patriots, yet according to that poll the percentage responding that they had seen a Patriots game live was higher than for the Red Sox, even though there are on the order of five times as many seats available for butts.

 

Actually it wasn't go look at it again

Red Sox 43%
Pats 38%