I love numbers because they tell stories that sometimes defy reality, but often provide some truth and guidance. Naturally, I was drawn to today’s WSJ article detailing the numbers behind NFL broadcasts. Their analysis concludes that in a typical 3-hour NFL broadcast, there are 11 minutes of actual play. The rest is eaten up by coach shots, replays (more than actual plays), standing around, commercials, and other trivial variables. I applied some of my own numbers to breakdown some of the costs involved with this on a more street level.
NY Jets engaged in the seldom seen act of running. photo by David J. Philip
My old boss was a son-of-a-bitch (irrelevant but true), and held Giants season tickets even though he often didn’t attend games. Football to his family is more important that religion, so he was willing to pay the PSL (personal seat license) at $20,000/seat plus the price of the ticket itself. His family is paying over $100,000 to watch the Giants play roughly 6 home games. Six multiplied by 11 minutes = 66 minutes. In the first year after purchasing these seats, he’s paying at least $1500 per minute of play. Of course, the PSL is a one-time cost that gets eaten up over time, but factor in the game-day ticket price, parking, concessions, etc. and the cost is till close to $500/game. I unfortunately was dragged to a game last year and spent roughly 12 hours for this one event in order to watch 11 minutes of ball movement. I’m not knocking sports. I like the drama of athletic competition and don’t see a single thing wrong with the act of play, but…
This is becoming more than play or even a profession. This has elevated even past megalomania and seems like it’s risen to the point of social experimentation, as in, “I wonder just how ridiculous this can get.” I contemplate how generations 200 years from now will judge the current state of play, recreation, and competitive sport. There’s so many angles to take with these numbers, it’s difficult to begin picking it apart from economic twilight, peak oil, gross resource wastage, social distortion points of view. I’ll let you do it in the comments section below, so let me hear what you think.
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I’ll ask the same question another writer did: “Why does Seattle need a $70 million retractable roof for its $517 million stadium?” That same writer astutely noted: “The baseball months in Seattle are significantly drier than those in Cleveland, Chicago or New York, three cities with newish, roofless ballparks. Safeco’s roof is a costly and utterly pointless gimcrack. A “25-million-pound action toy,” the architecture critic John Pastier has called it, not to mention a “waste of money” and a “waste of space.” The rest of the stadium is more or less plagiarized from all the other ye olde ballparks of the 1990s, which, as we’ve noted before, are retro only in the sense that Medieval Times is retro. For lack of anything else, then, the roof has become Safeco’s sole defining characteristic. Think Wrigley, you see ivy. Think Fenway, you see the Green Monster. Think Safeco, $517 million Safeco, and what do you see? An exercise in large-scale, rigorously engineered public masturbation. My oh my.” Additionally, “In Seattle, for example, after voters had narrowly defeated a proposal to build a new stadium for the Mariners baseball team in 1995, The Seattle Times — which had provided free ad space for the pro-stadium campaign — first editorialized that this represented “a striking affirmation of the region’s commitment to baseball … half of King County voters would tax themselves to keep the team there.” (That slightly over half had voted not to tax themselves wasn’t deemed worthy of notice.) The next day, the paper ran a front-page story headlined “Stadium Not Yet Dead,” in which it suggested ways that the state government could go ahead with the stadium despite the popular vote. One month later, the state legislature would do just that.
The same press corps that never tires of unearthing minor-league boondoggles in massive federal spending bills is the same one that, with rare exception, happily rolls over whenever some local baron floats the notion of a gleaming new ballpark built on the public dime. A horrible new stadium goes up; the taxpayers are on the hook for years; but it’s all OK, because some sportswriter up in the press box looks out at the emerald expanse and starts to feel a little tingle.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. If you want to read the full article it’s here: http://deadspin.com/5337402/why-your-stadium-sucks-safeco-field
Guillermo: Here in Milwaukee, the stadium went to a public vote. It was voted down. The ‘govern’ment overrode the public vote and built the stadium anyway. Part of the boondoggle was a sales tax, and the cost of the retractable roof ended up being more than double its proposed price because of repairs and faults.
“By the numbers” could just as well be “because of numbers”. My background is in R & D and the military. My wife is a math freak with some aspy tendencies. I am good with numbers, and I have a natural feel for quantification. I find that humans are easily fooled and diverted by numbers because most don’t have the same reality-applied feel for the numbers. Sports have a real purpose of re-creation when they are played. The rest of this is just marketing and stealing candy from babies because of lizard brains responding to shiny, noisy crap. The more people work with numbers, the more easily they can be fooled to think numbers are important because numbers are important to THEM. A model of the universe isn’t the universe. A picture of a horse doesn’t prove that horses are made of paper and crayons. A model of a new economy with a shiny new stadium only works if everyone BELIEVES in the model. It’s religion, not math, and it’s all in the marketing.
This makes me wish I’d titled this post “Shiny, Noisy Crap.”
I actually borrowed the term a long time ago. It’s from a Bizarro comic. There’s a vending machine with the choices “Truth”, “Beauty”, “Justice” and “Shiny, Noisy Crap”.
The “Shiny, Noisy Crap” has a sign taped to it that says, “Sold Out” and there’s a kid banging his head on the machine.
Fuckin’ eh.
Oh yeah..one other point I wanted to make here: While selling vegetables at the local farmers’ market, I noticed one thing about people; they will pay any price for crap they don’t need and have no thought at all what it cost to make it (wind chimes, shiny rocks, horses made from beer cans, health insurance, foam cheese hats, etc.), but when it comes to something they actually NEED, like wisdom, bandages, or food, they raise holy hell if they aren’t getting it for free.
Shiny, Noisy Crap. Ha! That’s a good one.