Monday, January 21, 2008
More Evidence that Atlanta Sucks as a Sports Town
While the ratings for the BCS Championship Game were down around the country, the ratings for the game were unchanged in Atlanta. In fact, the Atlanta market had higher ratings for the game than any other market except for the markets for the participating teams. But that doesn't matter at all because the Braves don't sell out their playoff games.
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5 comments:
I don't think anyone thinks that people in Atlanta don't like sports or anything like that. They just don't necessarily support their own local teams as passionately as other cities do (e.g., the Braves' failure to sell out home playoff games). The explanation is pretty simple: as a metro area with a huge number of transplants, Atlanta has a lot of people who have allegiances to teams outside its home market. The same phemonenon can be seen in Miami.
Atlanta has always been a 2-sport town.
#1 - The football team up the road in Athens.
#2 - rotates based upon on-field success. Looks like right now this is a 3-way struggle b/t the Braves, Thrash, and Hawks.
The problem is, as anon said, one of transplants, but it's also an issue of time. So far, no Atlanta sports team has had a prolonged period of success besides the Braves with which to build a fan base. I argue about this with my boss at work, since I'm of the opinion that the Braves have a large fan base about to erupt with some better seasons in my generation, the 10 year olds of 1995-1996. We grew up with a winner, and now that we're graduating from college and getting our own jobs, we'll be able to afford going to games. We're the first generation of native Atlantians to have a decent sports team hook us. Now, if the Falcons or the Hawks can only generate some marginal success and grab today's youth, we'll have a decent sports town by the mid 2010's.
Come on! If college football was a major sport, Boston College would be playing for the title.
The Eagles capitalized on a season were they were mentioned as a darkhorse title team by climbing to 55th in the nation in attendance BTW. Mississippi State laughs at BC.
Well, in most cases, the north is pro-sports oriented, and the south is college. There are some very basic reasons for this (southern towns were not large enough in the late 1900's to build support for hometown teams the way that a New York or Chicago could), and only a few places deviate from this. The Braves are widely known as a pretty good franchise (mainly TBS there), but there aren't any other great historical teams in the South (unless you count Dallas, which I don't.), no Bears, no Packers, no Red Sox, no Yankees.
It's a divide brewed by the movement South of people during the 20th century. "New" sports towns are just now coming into their own.
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