Bold take time: Americans enjoy watching football. Like, a lot.
For all the pearl-clutching about how paying student-athletes would destroy the college game, for all the chest-pounding declarations that social justice messaging would crater the NFL, the numbers in 2022 tell a very different story. The farther we get from the generational disruption of the pandemic, the more it’s clear that American sports fans prize football over any other television option, much less any other sport, by a wide margin.
As groundbreaking statements go, “Americans love football” ranks somewhere between blinding, no-sh*t–Sherlock obvious and water-is-wet gospel truth.