First things first, ESPN has a sportsnation poll asking what your favorite sport is. What's not surprising is football's dominance both in terms of overall percentage, or that every state and internationally it is the #1 sport. What is surprising is that Nascar is in last. With 45,000 votes in, more than enough for a fair sample size, Nascar has a dreadful 3%, behind the NHL. And this is among stories that the Daytona 500 just set records for viewers, and that Nascar was becoming more popular than baseball.
There are 2 explanations for this:
1. Lots of people like Nascar, but they would rather watch football, given the choice. Perhaps if there was an option to rank your favorite sports, Nascar would have many second-place votes.
2. ESPN.com during the day is not a fair sample of the sports fans across the country. It is possible that sports fans during the day who like Nascar, may not have available internet access or prefer nascar websites instead of espn.
What is shocking though is how low 3% really is. Earlier when a poll asked which CBB team was most undeserving of a 1-seed, at least 5% picked UConn - over obviously inferior teams such as Gonzaga and Memphis. The point is that there is always a decent percentage of people who just pick everything, so to see Nascar with only 3% seems fishy.
But moving on to the state of the NFL currently. Due to no labor agreement, the salary cap will be much lower than expected. Which means that teams will have to cut many players: (The following is from ESPN)
The Chiefs started their salary cap purge Thursday by terminating the contracts of four veteran players: cornerbacks Eric Warfield and Dexter McCleon and linebackers Shawn Barber and Gary Stills.
The moves cleared out $6.3 million, but the Chiefs have more work to do to get under the $94.5 million salary cap. They started the day $18.1 million over the cap, so these moves leave them $11.9 million over.
I guess the good news about having a crappy defense, is that it is easy to find a bunch of shitty players to cut.
But I wonder, if so many teams have to cut people just to get under the cap, who is going to have any cap room to sign these hundreds of players that are now free agents. There are some decently high profile players that are just being cut, and I don't know if any one can afford to sign them.
Priest Holmes was reportedly considering retirement earlier in the week. I wonder if the Chiefs will end up making that decision for him, and drop his expensive salary.
You hit on my curiosity about the NFL. Who can sign these players? I saw the list of who's under and over the cap on ESPN.com and it seems like all of the players, good and bad, will have to take huge pay cuts. Sorry Shaun Alexander, you may be the MVP, but you should have signed that extension before the season.
ReplyDeleteThe NFL is going bananas. I still can't believe the Vikings would trade Culpepper for a mid-round draft pick. Really? You'd rather draft some guy I've never heard of from college and start Brad Johnson. People seem to have very short term memories when it comes to the NFL.
Did you hear that there might not be a draft next year or in two years. Everybody would be a free agent, able to sign with any team. Banana Sandwich.
I think the ESPN sample is skewed, and not just by time of day. I can definitely see more NFL and NBA fans going on their site than NASCAR ones. There's about a billion more statistics in those other sports to look up. Somehow I just don't see very many NASCAR fans on ESPN.
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