Why the NFL is the Best Sports League

Tyler Amell-Angst '22

The National Football League (NFL) is simply the best professional sports league, and there is no real competition. Consider the so-called “competition”—Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Hockey League (NHL), and Major League Soccer (MLS—including it is only a courtesy for the tens of fans across the country). Now imagine it’s Thursday afternoon: you’ve finished all your work for the week, and the rest of the day is yours to waste away in any way you would like. You check what’s on TV, and for the first time ever—this actually happened a few months ago—every sports league is playing at the same time! You ponder your options for a moment. An NBA playoff game featuring the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets, a myriad of MLB bouts, an enticing NHL faceoff, and the MLS all look promising, but you choose the Kansas City Chiefs versus the Houston Texans, the only NFL game on TV and a sure blowout. Those unfamiliar with the world of sports would question that choice, but really it never was one. Here’s why you would choose the NFL every time:

1. Your team always has a chance of winning a championship, whether you live in Los Angeles or Green Bay, Dallas, or Boston, or anywhere in between. Unlike the NBA or MLB, in which the big market teams like the Lakers and New York Yankees are always vying for a championship, the NFL pecking order isn’t a constant. For reference, the four teams remaining in these years NFL playoffs, as of January 23rd, are the Kansas City Chiefs, the Bufallo Bills, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Green Bay Packers—not the flashiest of places, right? The main factor here is that the NFL shares all its revenue equally between its 32 teams in conjunction with fluctuating salary caps, preventing franchises from building super teams like we see far too often in the NBA and MLB. This revenue parity extends to advertising revenue and sports paraphernalia sales as well. As in all sports leagues for a few years or even a decade, dominant players and teams will rise to the top, but they never have a guaranteed win on Sunday; drama is always there. This may just be me, but I would much rather put money on a massive NFL upset than an NBA, MLB, or NHL one.
   
2. The NFL season consists of only 16 games before the playoffs begin. Compare that to the whopping 162 of Major League Baseball, 82 of basketball and hockey, and 34 of the MLS. Every NFL game matters so much more, and that’s why millions of fans plant themselves on the couch and enjoy ten straight hours of exciting, drama-filled football every Sunday. If the excitement of simply enjoying a game isn’t enough to keep you planted on your couch all day, maybe the extensive gambling and fantasy football sites will make you reconsider. The NFL and its myriad of extended forms of entertainment, including the vast array of opportunities for gambling and fantasy leagues, on top of the hours upon hours of analysis and predictions make NFL Sundays about as captivating as a sports league can get. Additionally, while one may mention the presence of fantasy leagues and betting in other sports, they simply dwarf in comparison to those of the NFL’s.
   
3. Finally, it is the game itself that makes the National Football League the most successful of any professional sports league. During a football game, each team has a roster of 53 men, ranging from dominant 350-pound linemen to blazing fast 5’8” wide receivers to impossibly athletic cornerbacks and linebackers to magicians under center. On each play, 11 men on each side of the ball, each with a distinct job, have to work together against another 11 men who are just as ferocious and driven. Five tall guys versus five other tall guys in basketball and 12 guys skating back and forth in hockey provides a much less desirable spectacle. Big plays can also come from anywhere at anytime from any player on the football field. The monotony of a 90-minute soccer game or a seemingly endless baseball game or the ritual, boring back-and-forth of basketball scoring, again, just cannot compare.
   

    To conclude, I’ll leave you with the viewership statistics (these are all from 2020): the NFL averaged 15.4 million viewers for each regular season game. The NBA Finals averaged 7.5 million, The MLB’s World Series averaged 9.8 million, the NHL’s Stanley Cup Finals averaged 2.2 million, and the MLS Cup final garnered 1.1 million viewers. In the famous words of Wayne Larrivee, “There is your dagger!” The NFL is king.

Sources:
https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/mls-cup-final-tv-ratings-viewers-fox-unimas#:~:text=The%20Major%20League%20Soccer%20(MLS,English%2Dlanguage%20network%20since%202010.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/240377/nba-finals-tv-viewership-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20watched%20the,winners%20of%20the%20Western%20Conference.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2021/01/08/in-2020-the-audience-of-nfl-regular-season-games-dropped/?sh=9f86ec77482e

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/11481-why-the-nfl-is-the-most-popular-sport-in-america#:~:text=This%20idea%20of%20equal%20revenue,football%20team%20on%20the%20field.&text=Revenue%20sharing%2C%20salary%20caps%20and,America%20in%20terms%20of%20popularity.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1059863-five-reasons-nfl-is-worlds-greatest-sport.

https://www.sportsrec.com/6564731/why-is-football-the-most-popular-sport-in-america


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