Below you will find our annual SportFacts Optimism Score for the 2018 MLB season. Each year, we give teams a preseason optimism score based on how excited people are about their team’s prospects. You can review the 2017 MLB preseason scores here for a fun look back at last year.
It has been one of the most common complaints among NFL viewers for the past several seasons: There are too many commercial breaks.
But despite analysis showing that over the past few years, the number of commercials per game has stayed fairly flat, the perception has become that the number of ads has gone up. Our hunch leads us to believe that the way people are consuming content has changed drastically over the past five years, turning this into more of a perception issue. When it’s possible to watch our favorite shows on Netflix ad-free, to tune into an NFL game on a normal television broadcast makes it seem like it’s nothing but commercials these days.
It has been an interesting year for the NFL. The sports league has seen one of the strongest bull markets of the past decade, with television ratings, attendance, and thus advertising revenue all skyrocketing in that time.
In Seattle, we’re pretty biased, Century Link Field, aka “The Clink,” is pretty spectacular, especially for evening games, with the sun going down over the Puget Sound, the lights of the stadium radiating south of downtown, with skyscrapers a stone’s throw away.
The SportFacts office is located in Seattle, so we know firsthand the pain and turmoil of losing a team, a few of us here still struggle watching NBA games, and a large percentage of us were all for Durant leaving if it meant turmoil for the Thunder. Is it way past time to be getting over it? Probably. But we’re not.
With that in mind, we’re sympathetic with San Diego, who, due to one of the least popular owners in the NFL doing terrible owner things, had their team ripped away and plopped in a seemingly uninterested city. But we found a statistic this weekend that might make those in San Diego laugh just a bit.
We did in fact see a notable decrease during week one, anywhere between five and 15 minutes fewer commercials in most games
Touchdown – commercial – extra point – commercial – kickoff – commercial.
Last year, we ran the numbers and on average, each NFL game had around 55-65 minutes of commercials. This wasn’t an increase from previous years, but the perception was that there were far more ads, a problem for the NFL. We reported that the reasons for this perception are likely twofold:
“You don’t owwwwwn me” took the top spot on the podium last year, voted by fans as by far the most annoying commercial played throughout the NFL season. Congratulations Toyota!
We wanted to get a feel for what fans thought of the opening weekend advertisements thus far. And while it will probably take a few weeks to really let the hate soak in, there are some pretty clear front runners after the opening weekend’s games were played.
Preseason is over, and the final rosters have been set. With that in mind, there have been a whole stream of prediction articles coming out, but we wanted to hear what each team’s fans were thinking. Over the past week, we took a poll of 1,277 NFL fans to get a feel for how everyone thinks the NFL standings will look at the end of the 2017-18 season for their respective divisions. Read more
The start of the NFL season is days away, and we couldn’t be more excited. But of course we’re also a little nervous. The beginning of the season offers hope, with that shade of doubt over the “what ifs.”
In order to get sentiment on what each team’s fan base is most afraid of for the upcoming season, we spent the last four weeks during the preseason scraping for data surrounding hundreds of fan blogs, tens of thousands of social media posts, various press power rankings, as well as surveying NFL fans. Below you will find our analysis on what each team’s fans are most worried about for the upcoming 2017-18 NFL season as well as whether or not fan expectations for the team are low, medium or high.
With the 2017-18 NFL season only a few weeks away, we wanted to look back at 2016-17 one more time and review some numbers on what was driving fans crazy last year.
We took a survey of 1,084 NFL fans, and mixed responses with social media trends by using tracking tools for sports-related commentary around the web, looking for trending complaints. It was pretty obvious there were two last year that drew most of the internet’s concern, but some others of course emerged as well.