I ran across two articles yesterday evening that I thought had a similar theme.
The first one is recent and comes from The Big Lead. The author, Jason Lisk, did some number crunching of Harris Poll reports over the last nineteen years. To be honest, I hated my freshman year Probability & Statistics class at Tulane so reading some his explanations makes my head hurt. But his overall point is this:
When I look at the 25th percentile in popularity rank for each franchise, the total percentages for all 32 teams add up to about 55% of the fans. That's why I say the number could be almost half of all self-identified fans of football being "fair weather" fans.
Basically, Lisk is asserting that of all people who call themselves football fans, about half of them are "fair weather" fans. Which, admittedly, sounds pretty damn high. The Saints in particular had quite a lot of people hop aboard the bandwagon during that nineteen year span, more so than any other team in fact:
The Saints saw three times as many people claim them as the favorite team, compared to any other time over the last 19 years;
While reading that article, however, I discovered another article direct from the people at The Harris Poll. Less than a month ago, they revealed a study showing that most NFL fans will still continue to watch NFL football, even if games are missed due to the current lockout.
When Americans were asked how much more or less likely they are, if at all, to watch football when the season begins, two thirds report that they will not be any more or less likely to watch (67%)
So would it be safe to assume that more people are loyal to the NFL itself than they are of a specific team? What do you take from all of these facts and figures?
Discuss amongst yourselves...