The Challenge of Loyalty in a Disposable World Part II: Fantasy Football and the Transfer Portal
This week is a huge one for me and a boatload of other Americans: it’s the start of Fantasy Football season! Beginning Thursday night, more than 50 million Americans will join me in cheering on our teams. But instead of cheering on the city-based teams that we grew up rooting for (for me it was the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) and, later, the Carolina Panthers), we’ll be cheering for 50.4 million unique teams – the sixteen players we “draft” for our individual teams.
Everyone on my new “team” wears a different jersey.
This season as a “team owner” I have a new set of incentives. I should ignore the Commanders altogether (I have no players on my fantasy team from there) and pray that the Panthers will stay close in their games so that they won’t be forced to throw and my Panther running back, Miles Sanders, will get more carries. And I should be rooting for the Kansas City Chiefs (whom I’ve never cared about in the past), to score lots of points, but only via touchdown passes and field goals, not on the ground (I have their QB and kicker on my team).
What does this do to my enjoyment of professional football? As a fantasy team owner, there’s no reason for me to watch any actual games because my players are from 14 different teams and the only thing that matters is highlights – if one of my players scores, I want to know immediately. Fortunately, there are special TV channels I can turn to that skip all the plays that make up the bulk of a football game and serve up only players scoring fantasy points.
Net impact: more people are playing fantasy than watching the actual games. An average NFL game might attract 16-20 million viewers - really good for TV these days - but less than half of the number of people playing fantasy.
We’ve started watching NFL players more than NFL teams.
There’s a similar challenge in college sports, as rules about transferring are relaxed.
I’m a lifelong NC State fan, but I have no clue who is going to be playing basketball for them on their men’s team this year. One player went pro, three transferred to other schools, six players are transferring in from other schools, and two freshmen are coming in. That leaves two players on the team from the previous season (Ernest Ross (who scored 3.5 points per game last year) and Casey Morsell, who arrived last season from UVa). At Colorado University as new coach Deion Sanders came in, 56 scholarship players transferred to other schools and 51 transferred in to play for Colorado. The good news about the new “transfer portal” rules? Players don’t get stuck at schools where they aren’t successful. The transfer portal, like free agency in professional sports, has transformed players lives.
The bad news?
In the new world of college fandom, fans have no chance to watch players develop over time, to get to know them and to get excited about what they will be like in the coming season. Chances are whoever you liked this year will be gone next.
There’s always been something special about Americans’ loyalty to our sports teams: depending on your rooting interest, you will claim to “bleed” light blue, dark blue, orange, green (I checked this weekend after getting a mosquito bite; as an NC State fan I still bleed red – whew!). Teams at all levels depend on that loyalty. Professional teams want to sell seat licenses and merch. Colleges do the same, and they also find there is something else even more important about team loyalty: donations to the colleges increase when people actually care about the team.
2023 rankings of companies by reputation — note the volatility of “top movers” (from Visualcapitalist.com — thanks to Marshall Brain II for sharing this graphic)
Sports loyalty has always been more enduring than business brand loyalty. This year in the rankings of top brands, Tesla’s reputation sank by 50 spots and Twitter/X fell into the bottom 4 (tough year for Elon Musk); Chrysler fell 22 spots; meanwhile Nike was up 35 places and American Express jumped 29.
As our teams become more volatile, less predictable, or less important, our loyalty to them becomes much more tenuous and we risk losing something special. The danger is that our teams become regular old “products” and, rather than “bleeding to death” for them, we may just dump them at the next sign of scandal.
References:
Relationship of giving to colleges to athletic success: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/the-passion-and-pitfalls-of-giving-to-college-sports/#:~:text=In%202000%2C%20Thomas%20Rhoads%20and,than%20two%20NCAA%20tournament%20appearances.
Transfers to Colorado University football team this year: https://247sports.com/college/colorado/Season/2023-Football/TransferPortal/?institutionkey=24020