Rain Check! NFL Makes It Too Tempting To Pass Up the Real Deal
If a friend or business acquaintance called you right now and offered a face value ticket to tonight’s Patriots-Jets game, would you take it?
If you answered yes, please accept my congratulations and sympathies. You love football and the Pats much more than I do. Also more than I consider healthy.
The National Weather Service is calling for showers with “some heavy downpours’’ to fall on Foxborough tonight. That’s after a day of heavy rainfall. There aren’t many folks with the sort of raingear that’d keep them from being soaked to the bone after sitting out in three-plus hours of that nonsense … and I’m not one of ‘em.
I should get wet to watch the New York Jets in action? Risk a cold to watch the New York Jets stand around during commercial breaks? Sorry, but no.
And for the chance to get wet, most Boston-area ticket holders will drive through rush hour in the rain on Route 128 and I-95 or Route 1. That is to say, they’ll sit in their cars, moving at a walking pace for well over an hour. Then they’ll get to repeat that experience going home, with the added bonuses of being drenched and knowing that a significant percentage of the drivers around them in the traffic jam have been drinking.
Then they’ll arrive home long after midnight, burdened by the knowledge that if they’ve got a job, they have to be up and at it in the morning. Friday will be a blur, except for the sneezing and coughing generated by hours of extreme wetness.
Common sense says one can love football and the Pats just as much and in far more comfort watching the game on TV at home. No parking hassles, cheaper and better concessions, and best of all, you can change the channel if the game stinks (maybe to the Bruins at Montreal), which it almost surely will. Off to bed before the poor sods in Gillette Stadium have finished the walk from their seats to their cars.
Patriots’ night games are the most extreme example of a dilemma facing the entire National Football League. It has succeeded so well in its creation of the country’s most popular television show that watching the show has become a better entertainment experience than being a member of its studio audience. Efforts to improve the “fan experience’’ such as free wifi and hi-def Jumbotrons are actually admissions the problem might be insolvable. It’s the NFL saying, “we know our sport isn’t as much fun as your smartphone.’’
Most NFL games are still sellouts, as tonight’s Pats game will be. NFL crowds are primarily composed of season ticket holders. They are loath to write off a game as a sunk cost, but vulgar economics can’t explain why they’ll show up when the Coast Guard is issuing small craft warnings. The pleasures of being at a pro football game are rooted in the human psyche.
Bonding is one such pleasure. Few fans come alone to a Patriots game. They attend in groups, members of social networks who hold 10 meetings a year in the Gillette parking lots and at their seats, surrounded by other groups much like themselves. People love shared experiences. It may be perverse, but there will be some Pats fans who’ll spend tomorrow bragging about how wet they were tonight.
The prospect of congenial interaction with peers only goes so far at the gate. Nobody in Jacksonville is touting the bonding experience offered by the Jaguars. Most New Englanders who put up with the time and likely discomfort required to attend a game at Gillette for the same reason teams in every sport have sold tickets since sports began. They expect the Pats to win. They crave vicarious participation in a definitive victory, something everyday life seldom supplies.
As a species, we are front runners and always will be. Back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, before Bob Kraft bought the franchise and the Pats were a bad joke on the field, a weather forecast like tonight’s would’ve meant a “crowd’’ of 20,000 or less for a home game. Some might call such fickle behavior disloyal and unfanlike. I call it sensible.
Gillette Stadium will always be an inconvenient trip for most Pats fans. November and December weather in these parts isn’t about to improve. More than most NFL teams, the Pats have an at-risk studio audience, a point of financial vulnerability that the canny businessmen of the Kraft family know well. It’s what put the franchise on the market for them to purchase in the first place. It guides the franchise’s management style.
The Patriots have run into some criticism in recent seasons for taking an overly long-range approach to building a football team. Moves like the Logan Mankins trade are blasted on the grounds that Krafts are not going “all in’’ (horrid phrase) to win a Super Bowl right now and hang the future expense. The Pats are seen as always promising jam tomorrow and never jam today.
It must be noted that whatever the critics say, the New England franchise has served its fan base one hell of a lot of jam in the last decade. It should also be noted that as a business proposition, the Krafts have little alternative to but to strive for consistent success rather than plunge for the occasional championship followed by a 5-11 season or two. Their studio is too far away from most of its audience to do otherwise.
Selling a long and difficult journey to front runners is never easy.
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