A key segment of fantasy football, as big a driver of NFL growth as anything in recent years, saw its massive numbers plateau. According to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming,Fjallraven Kanken Australia Sale, entry fees for daily fantasy games increased by 4 percent in 2016, compared to 222 percent the year before, as several states explored the legality of what some perceive as gambling.
Actual fans? The Chargers clearly don't need them too badly. While Kroenke's palace is under construction, they're willing to play in a 30,000-seat soccer venue near downtown LA that is smaller than two-thirds of the stadiums in college football's Mountain West Conference.
Two NFL teams abandoned fan bases in St. Louis and San Diego in favor of their original home, Los Angeles, where neither team had played for decades. And the Raiders are considering leaving Oakland for Las Vegas , which, for all its renown as America's gambling capital, has never supported its own big-league team.
Peter Schoenke,Hockey Jerseys Wholesale, president of rotowire.com, which churns out millions of bits of information for fantasy players, said he's optimistic that fantasy will rebound.
One big question: Does the average fan even matter anymore in the NFL's math?
In building new stadiums and retrofitting old ones, the league has acknowledged, on some level, that the game itself is no longer enough to keep fans in the stands engaged. TVs on seatbacks and improved internet connections are all part of the reality of 21st-century fandom.
It also brought football back to Los Angeles, times 2, and could be moving the Raider Nation to the desert.
The Rams and Chargers each moved out of cities where they'd played for decades — unable to strike deals in their existing homes, and with the lure of a $2.6 billion stadium being funded by Rams owner Stan Kroenke too enticing to ignore. Luxury boxes and ancillary revenue from attractions adjacent to the stadium will help pay some of the bills. A bundle of TV contracts worth nearly $40 billion through 2022 will bankroll the rest.
Brady will close the season going for his fifth Super Bowl ring in a game that will draw high ratings thanks to the decades-long hold the NFL has held over American sports fans. That the infatuation will last indefinitely, however, may no longer be a given. Baseball, boxing and horse racing once consumed the American public, but they don't anymore.
"What we're trying to do is make our ... games as exciting and as action-packed as possible," Goodell said.
All this was piled on top of ongoing narratives about concussions and their effect on players, a domestic-violence problem that hasn't abated, Colin Kaepernick's national-anthem protests and the leadership of a commissioner, Roger Goodell, who is often portrayed as heavy-handed and clueless on some of the league's most pressing problems. Exhibit A: "Deflategate," which led to the four-game suspension of arguably the league's best-known player, Tom Brady.
At stake is a $9 billion-a-year business that, in trying to increase its global footprint,Adidas Stan Smith Shoes Cheap, has brought three games to London and one to Mexico, all of which were international hits.
It didn't help the fantasy industry when a DraftKings employee won $350,000 in a FanDuel contest in 2015 — leading to trust issues for the two largest daily fantasy companies, which had gone largely unregulated.
"When you lose people in cities, lose people for entertainment reasons, lose people who identify with certain teams and because there's this weird mercenary element to it all, it can be a problem," Simons said. "You've also got a replacement, in the NBA, that's at its most-entertaining moment in decades. All that can be a real threat, and you have to be careful, or you can go the way of boxing."
"You've got bad games, (concussions) and drugs, and a declining interest in the game in general,Adidas NMD Shoes Cheap," said Orin Starn, a Duke professor who studies sports in society. "When you throw in this welfare for billionaires with these stadium shakedowns, you wonder at what point the good will of 'Joe NFL Fan' is going to dissipate and people are going to lose interest in the NFL."
"I think this year, a lot of people got thrown off their rhythm. They were watching the debates, (ticked) off about Kaepernick," Schoenke said. "It threw a big chunk of people off. I think next year, it could settle back down."
TV ratings declined 8 percent , with the presidential election partly, but not solely, to blame. Many of the league's highest-profile contests were boring blowouts, including eight of the 10 playoff games leading to