Is the NFL Giving Fans Too Much Football? Head to cozyearth.com and use code WINGO for an exclusive 20% off. Andrew Brandt joins Trey Wingo to talk about one of the biggest questions around the NFL: can the league ever become too big? Trey starts with the idea of scarcity. Part of what made the NFL so powerful is that fans had to wait for it. Sunday mattered. Monday night mattered. One game a week made the product feel special. But now the NFL is everywhere. There are games all day Sunday, including early international games. Monday Night Football. Thursday Night Football. Thanksgiving games. A Black Friday game. Christmas games. Saturday games late in the season. And now even Thanksgiving Eve is becoming part of the NFL calendar. So Trey asks the real question: is the NFL messing with the formula that made it so valuable? America’s Addiction Trey says football is not America’s pastime anymore. It is America’s national addiction. Andrew says he would like to think the NFL could eventually go too far, but the evidence still says no. The league has survived concerns over protests, concussions, politics, sports betting and oversaturation, and the appetite for football is still massive. Trey brings up Mark Cuban’s old warning that “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.” Andrew’s response is simple: the hogs are not close to getting slaughtered. Schedule Overload The conversation gets into whether fans will keep planning every other day of the week around NFL games. Trey points out that players like Jason Kelce have talked about what makes football special: you only get one game a week, and everyone builds toward it. Andrew admits that even he has had moments where it felt like there was too much football, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas. But whether that feeling becomes universal is still the question. Cowboys Value and the Next Sale From there, Trey and Andrew connect the schedule conversation back to franchise value. After the Seahawks sold for nearly $10 billion, Trey asks what the Dallas Cowboys could be worth. If Seattle is worth almost $10 billion, is America’s Team worth $20 billion? Andrew explains that some franchises may never actually hit the open market, including the Cowboys, Patriots, Bengals, 49ers and Eagles, because they are family-controlled teams. Still, the larger point is clear: NFL ownership has become one of the most valuable assets in sports. Green Bay and the NFL’s Secret Sauce The conversation ends with one of the most interesting parts of the NFL business model: Green Bay. Trey points out that the Packers play in the smallest market in major American professional sports, yet they are able to compete because the NFL shares revenue equally across teams. Andrew calls it “corporate socialism.” The league’s owners are extremely capitalist in almost every other business sense, but the NFL works because every team gets an equal share of the national revenue. That is why Green Bay can compete with New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. It is also why NFL franchise values keep climbing. The question is whether the league can keep adding more games, more windows and more money without damaging what made the product special in the first place. For now, the answer still seems to be yes. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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