Readers Not Rams Fans

Next year professional football will return to St. Louis when the XFL league begins play in 8 cities.  Can it compete with the NFL, will it outlast its initial 3 years of funding?  Hard to say, but it seems the NFL isn’t the sure thing it once was:

The lowest-scoring Super Bowl in history turned off fans Sunday, with the matchup between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams drawing the game’s smallest TV audience since 2008.

TV’s most-watched annual event drew 98.2 million viewers, down 5% from last year when 103.4 million viewers watched on NBC, according to Nielsen data.
 
Counting those who watched the game on streaming platforms, CBS put the total audience at 100.7 million viewers, down 4.5% from the 105.4 million who watched on all platforms last year when the Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles. (Los Angeles Times)

On Sunday we asked Siri a couple of times for the current score, but we didn’t watch the game at all. Yawn.

Here are the results from the non-scientific poll:

Q: Who do you want to win in today’s NFL Super Bowl?

• Don’t care: 16 [53.33%]
• New England Patriots: 9 [30%]
• Los Angeles Rams: 4 [13.33%]
• Undecided: 1 [3.33%]

More backed the Patriots over the Rams, still far less than the “don’t care” crowd.

One Kansas City politician has a solution to the lack of an NFL team in St. Louis:

City Councilman and mayoral candidate Quinton Lucas told St. Louis television station KMOV that if it comes down to losing a home game, he thinks the Chiefs would be better off trying to build a regional footprint rather than an international following.

“I don’t think it’s just a pie in the sky thing,” Lucas told a St. Louis reporter.

The Chiefs lost a home game to play against the Detroit Lions in London in 2015.

The Chiefs were scheduled to play an away game in Mexico City in 2018 only to have that game moved to Los Angeles due to poor field conditions. They’re scheduled again for an away game in Mexico City in 2019.

Lucas thinks the team would be better off playing across the state than across the world. (KMBC)

Interesting. Given that the XFL plays at a different time of year than the NFL there wouldn’t be a venue conflict. The NFL’s reason for playing a home game abroad is an attempt to compete with football (aka soccer).

— Steve Patterson