‘Believe-land’ having a sensational 2016
Toronto’s Grey Cup tickets selling at discount, NFL’s TV ratings struggling
BULLS OF THE WEEK
It’s been a very good opening week to the season for Canadianbased franchises in the NHL, most notably the undefeated 4-0 Vancouver Canucks and the 4-1 Edmonton Oilers in the West plus the 3-0-1 Montreal Canadiens in the East. It will take some time, of course, to see whether that translates into playoff success after last spring’s 0-for-7 debacle for Canadian NHL teams (an all-time low and the first time since 1970 that not a single Canadian team had qualified for the Stanley Cup tournament).
Our bulls of the week, however, are the Cleveland Indians and the “Believe-land” thing that the much-disparaged Lake Erie city has going on this year. After the NBA Cavaliers rode on LeBron James’ coattails to break the city’s 52-year major league championship drought last spring ( just weeks after the Lake Erie Monsters brought Cleveland a Calder Cup American Hockey League title — the team has since changed its name to the Cleveland Monsters), baseball’s Indians are in the World Series for the first time since 1997. They’re looking to win it all for the first time since 1948.
Despite the bullish week, not everything is hunky dory for the AL Central winners, including ongoing controversy around their nickname, in general, and their Chief Wahoo mascot, in particular, and a per-game attendance average of 19,650 that was in the bottom three of all of Major League Baseball this past regular season.
BEARS OF THE WEEK
It was never a good sign for Charlie Brown’s friend Lucy when she had to mark her Thanksgiving pies down to five cents a slice ... or less. It was just Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s way of reminding us of the power of supply and demand.
That pillar of Economics 101 reared its ugly head for the Toronto Argonauts and their local organizing committee for the 2016 Grey Cup as they announced wide-ranging ticket discounts barely a month before the 104th edition of the CFL championship game.
It was a reflection of the low demand for the CFL in the country’s largest media market — at least at the exorbitant premium prices originally conceived of for the first-ever Grey Cup to be played at BMO Field — despite the low supply of 35,000 seats at the expanded home of the Argos and Toronto FC.
Yet even more bearish this week is the NFL for its poorest season of TV ratings in years — at least in prime time. The biggest casualties have been Monday Night Football (with audiences down as low as eight million from last year’s earlyseason highs of 14.4 million), Sunday Night Football (down to a low of 13.6 million from a 2015 high of 26.8 million) and the relatively new concept of Thursday Night Football.
The overall drop of 11 per cent in NFL audiences this year is explained in part by the typical dip that takes place in years of U.S. presidential elections, likely especially pronounced in this cycle of reality TV Trump-style. That’s why it’ll take the NFL TV numbers after Nov. 8 to have a better handle on the other contributing factors, ranging from bad matchups and potentially too many prime-time matchups, to Deflategate and the Colin Kaepernick-inspired anthem protests, along with one factor that will only continue to grow: the number of younger fans opting to watch by streaming the games to their smart phones or tablets.