More of "Florida is a Tough Sports Market"

My 2 bits.

FL is very warm so people want to get outside (or stay inside because it is so frickin hot and humid )and do things, basically not watch sports. It is also much more into College Football than any pro sports teams. The FSU/Miami/Florida triology is intense. I went to Sports Authority, just North of Miami, they had TONS of FSU, FL, and UM stuff...almost nothing for Panthers/Dolphins/Heat/Marlins. Almost every year, the Dolphins playoff game is blacked out because they can't fill the stadium. Maybe also because FL doesn't have a huge middle class that can afford pro sports attendance.

And finally, maybe they just suck at being sports fans...you know fair weather fans (the worst kind). Look @ the Marlins, they were hot and sold out won a WS, now they can't draw flies!

FL couldn't keep the Fusion (they won a title!) or the TB club.

 

JAcksonville is not the only town getting blackout in the home opener. Seahawks got blacked out too. I believe there were around 15,000 seats available.

52,xxx something was the attendance
Man U sold out in 4 hours with 67,000 and the cheapest ticket was 35 dollars. Of course it is only a one-time thing. But it is also an exhibition whereas the Seahawks is 1 in 8 thing and a regular season game.

 

The NFL contracted?

 

Re: Re: Re: More of "Florida is a Tough Sports Market"

You mispelled "Dodgers". When the Lakers sucked post-Showtime, the Forum was not the happening place it once was, while the Blue Crew, even in years where they sucked mightily, have drawn numbers for which most MLB-owners without that New Stadium Effect would kill their own mothers.

But your point is well taken. Florida suffers from what LA can attribute down cycles in attendance as well, and that's the transplant effect. When so much of your potential market developed their sports affiliations in a previous chapter of their lives, then building a solid fan base can take at least a generation if not more.

 

Re: My 2 bits.

Without going into detail I will simply say that your analysis is almost universally incorrect.

 

Who needs pro sports when you've got South Beach, Key West, water on 3 sides, and a Red Lobster in every mall?

 

Who needs pro sports when you have Medicare?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...entsinfloridaliningupforallthatmedicarecovers

 

Let me just echo SoFla Metro. The Marlins sold out their games during the World Series because not even the Braves could fail to sell out World Series games. They sell out themselves. Outside of the World Series, which sold out every possible seat in the baseball configuration, they didn't exactly draw SRO crowds. And with good reason. As a baseball park, Pro Player is a great football stadium. As for the Fusion, what title? The Eastern Division? Break out the bubbly.

But Florida does pretty good at hockey for some reason. It's like they're trying to prove Reg Dunlop right. The Panthers averaged better attendence than hockey hotbeds like Boston and Buffalo, the Florida Everblades led the ECHL in attendence, and the Lightning had the best average attendence in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. St. Petersburgh Times Forum seats 19,764 and they averaged almost 22,000 per game. They must like the cool arenas.

 

searching to see if Portland might get a MLB team in 2004 and got this, which in addition to the MLB stuff have an update on the NFL number.

15 out of 16 games were sold out (seattle was not)
This weekend four teams got blacked-out. Raiders being one of them, which was a suprised to me since they went to the SuperBowl last year. (oh notice that the author call the NFL, National Felons League )

http://www.canada.com/montreal/sports/story.asp?id=297EE711-7A89-43DA-88DB-6517A8129142

NFL update: A few hours after NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced that the National Felons League was off to a fast start, there was contradictory evidence from the hinterlands.

Tagliabue noted that 15 of the 16 games on the opening weekend were sold out, but home TV coverage of four games will be blacked out this weekend because the games weren't sold out 72 hours before game time. The cities affected are Phoenix, Indianapolis, Jacksonville and Oakland. The Raiders are blacked out for the 44th time in 65 games since they returned to the Bay Area. There are more than 15,000 unsold tickets for the Raiders game, which sounds like the basis for another Al Davis lawsuit.

 

Lest we forget:

Florida's two WNBA teams were contracted, the WUSA team never played a game (the Orlando Tempest), and two of the original four teams set for contraction in MLB were to have been Tampa Bay and Florida.

To have Jax not sell out is a real indictment of Florida's sports market. What the he-doublehockeysticks is going on down there?

 

The "Floridans need air conditioning" argument makes sense until you look at the Miami Heat. When they built the AA Arena a few years ago, they made the mistake of painting the seats yellow, which really shows on TV and every Heat telecast featured a full frontal assault of yellow empty seats. I was in Miami Beach when the Arena opened, and they were practically giving tickets away but still couldn't sell out.

So the possibilities are:
a) South Floridans like hockey better than basketball
b) The Panthers are better at marketing than are the Heat
c) Suburban arena is better than downtown arena
d) combination of the above

 

OK I lied I'm going to respond

Decent points about college, but the pro teams stuff is way off. We do all right for ourselves money-wise down here, but nobody has any allegiance to the local pro sports teams because everybody comes from somewhere else.

I'm met huge sports fans here - Yankees fans, Giants fans, Jets fans etc. To them, those are their home teams.

Consider that the Yankees spring training complex is only a few miles away from Tropicana Field, where the Devil Rays play.

The Marlins dismantled their World Series team in record time. Since, every time fans start to identify with a player, they trade him for "prospects" (definition: Cheaper labor).

I think you got those two backwards

 

To underscore this point, the sports editor at a paper where I previously worked went to a national convention. He got involved in a discussion about the difficulty of financing a major league baseball beat writer. An editor from Florida was talking when Greg asked him what team he was talking about, the Devil Rays or Marlins.

Neither, the guy told him. The Red Sox. He was from the paper in Fort Myers where the Red Sox have spring training and lots of Bostonians have retired.

 

Whoops

I knew all that, but just forget to mention it. But whatever happened to supporting local teams??

 

Re: Whoops

So if I am a lifelong Braves fan, end up moving to Florida (or whereever) because that's where life takes me, I'm supposed to drop my lifelong allegiances because of geography? As far as I (and many transplants to Florida) am concerned, I do support my local team. The local team of my youth.

That said, I have been to many Marlins games and a couple of Dolphins games since I moved here, but if I still lived in Atlanta, I'd probably have season tickets.

That's a very tough nut for the Florida teams to crack.

 

Re: Whoops

Says ArsenalFan82 from Chicago.

But think about it, suppose you move to Amsterdam for business or to Monte Carlo to avoid paying taxes. Are you going to drop your previous alleigances and start supporting Netherlands and Ajax or Monaco?

The thing is, only the Dolphins have any sort of tradition in Florida, so even native Floridians have grown up following other teams.

 

That never would've been allowed to happen if Bud Selig had been alive.

 

So how can you explain Washington, DC teams. DC is probably the most transient of the transient cities in the country yet they still seem to support the pro teams at a better rate than in FL? It could be that there is a large concentration of wealth in the DC area but that seems to be a rather simplistic answer.

 

I don't know anything about Washington DC sports so I can't comment on that.

However, I imagine DC area sports pull from a greater population than just the city, and that folks in Va. (I would imagine) tend to be less transient than the wealthy folk in Georgetown.

 

I don't know how you'd explain the success of the Redskins, but any comprehensive theory about sports in Washington DC would have to also take into account the existence of the Minnesota Twins and the Texas Rangers.

 

Re: Re: Re: Whoops

You do see a lot of other teams' fans going to Marlins games etc. down here (i.e. they are like a second team).

FYI, the Marlins & the Braves are in the same division, so there is a bit of a conflict of interest there.