No attendance? No problem, as long as they watch TV

Last week, the Arizona Cardinals lost to the Atlanta Falcons, 6-3. The Cardinals have been battling it out with the Cincinnati Bengals for worst team in the NFL for the last 10 years (and it looks like the "Bungles" have given up the fight, in favor of playoff contention). Arizona has the worst record in the NFL since the beginning of last year's regular season. The Falcons have been little better lately except for an anomaly Super Bowl year, and their only attraction is Michael Vick. Despite the meeting of these two historically awful teams, 70,354 people showed up to watch.

Maybe it was just Vick who got people in the stands. Well, Arizona drew 51,557 at home against New England the previous week. When the Cardinals visited St. Louis in Week 1, the teams drew 65,538. That was right around last year's league average of 66,328.

Compare these numbers to the average attendance at an NHL game last year: 16,553. Major League Baseball averages 30,285 at its games. The NBA only averages 17,059.

The NFL's prowess seems to make sense. It's the big dog of pro sports. Even the Arizona Cardinals outsell the average team in all the other leagues. And the NHL is the puppy. But what about the NBA and MLB numbers?

Yao and Bron-Bron are ubiquitous even in the offseason, while the average fan couldn't pick out Gary Sheffield in a lineup, even after his Top 10 performance on Letterman this week.

The fact is that average game attendance is a poor measure of interest in a league. Practically every recap story of a pro game has the attendance number, as if that would tell the reader the popularity of the teams or the league that is putting on the game. In the case of comparing leagues, it's an even worse measure.

NBA teams and NHL teams have about five times the number of games as the NFL, and baseball has about 10 times as many. Multiply the attendance averages out over full seasons, and the league that is universally seen as the most successful in North America gets the fewest fans in the stands of the Big Four. The NBA barely outsells the woeful — and possibly soon-defunct — NHL. So what's the big deal about the NFL and NBA?

TV! Last week, two of the top eight shows in the Nielsen prime time ratings were related to Monday Night Football. Two NFL shows were in the top eight on cable this week, too.

The total number of viewers of NFL games over a season probably won't match that of Major League Baseball. But advertisers don't care about that nearly as much as they care about having a reliably huge audience at a predictable time. Thirty-eight of the top 75 TV shows of all time are Super Bowls.

But the NFL is far above the rest of the leagues in its broadcast rights agreements, according to data in "The Economics of Sports" by Michael Leeds and Peter von Allmen. The annual average of the current NFL broadcast contract gives the league $2.2 billion. Baseball, despite its enormous numbers of paying fans in the stands averages less the $500 million in TV revenue under its two current contracts (with ESPN and Fox).

The NFL's dog chow comes from TV contracts. Because of the unique revenue-sharing element that former Commissioner Pete Rozelle lobbied for, which provides equal sharing of revenue among all teams in the league, the NFL is able to keep the franchise values of its teams exhorbitantly high. The rights to the new franchise in Houston sold for $700 million.

The NHL, on the other hand, which has long eschued revenue sharing, is stuck in a lockout from which it may never return. Teams complain about low revenue, and players complain about low salaries. The only complaint that really matters, though, is that from the general public.

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Diehard hockey fans should not be the target audience for the NHL. Diehard fans are going to watch, no matter what. The problem is the casual viewer. The casual viewer will watch an NFL game, or even a weekend slate, because he doesn't have to invest his life in the sport to know what's going on. He can watch games one day a week and be fully caught up on what's going on.

Most importantly, football is TV-friendly. There is a 40-second break between plays in the NFL, allowing for a quick beer run to the fridge (leaving commercials more likely to be seen). TV timeouts don't break the action much more than the game would normally do on its own. And even better, someone who doesn't know how the game works can figure out what's going on pretty easily by following the big brown ball.

The NHL has some serious problems here. It's not a TV-friendly sport. The puck is tiny. The players move faster than in any other sport. Substitutions don't require a break in play, so a casual viewer can get confused easily about who's on the ice (announcers who keep it straight amaze me). And even when a viewer feels like he has a grip on what's going on, the puck is hidden behind the nearside boards, where it might stay for an extended period before reappearing.

While the NHL doesn't have the perfect weekly schedule of the NBA, it's a lot more user-friendly than baseball, with its agonizing 162-game season. The NHL has virtually the same schedule as the NBA, and yet its TV-unfriendly nature makes it a pariah in comparison. Each team earns only about $4 million each year from the NHL TV contract, compared to the NFL's $71 million.

The NBA makes $766.7 million annually, better than any league but the NFL, which meshes with its image in American culture. Nobody goes to the game in person, but it's pretty TV-friendly. As NFL defensive lineman Warren Sapp noted in response to a ban on NFL players taking their helmets off on the field, NBA players get their faces on TV all the time.

People can recognize an NBA player easily. Heck, one of our sports editors recognized the Nets' Aaron Williams in an airport. Don't tell me you could pick out Eddie Kennison — who has a similar role on an NFL team as Williams — in a crowd, even if he does play in the country's most popular sport.

The NBA has the disadvantage of game flow. A commercial imposes the only serious break in the action, and that means lost viewers at every break. That's lost revenue from sponsors and TV contracts.

Being TV-friendly is not the only factor in league success (the power of the players union jumps to mind as another big factor), but it is the one factor that leads to league success the most, by bringing in oodles of cash and the franchise stability that comes with it.

So next time you want to see how popular your team is in any sport, don't check the attendance. Check the Nielsens.