They like watching sports, they like talking about sports, they like thinking about sports.
It turns out you can track this tendency with data. When sports broadcasts are about sports, people watch more than when they are not about sports. The NFL’s ratings went down during the flag kneeling controversy of 2016-17, and went up after it subsided.
“If the conversation around football is primarily about the game, then we’re probably winning,” Michael Mulvihill, head of strategy and analytics at Fox Sports, told The Hollywood Reporter. “And if the conversation is about topics away from the game, we’re probably losing.