The Strib’s Mike Kaszuba on why the Vikes threats to move are likely as not just a cheap bluff, not unlike your teenager threatening to run away.
It’s about the numbers:
If the National Football League were to let the Minnesota Vikings leave the state over the team’s inability to get public financing for a new stadium, it would be tampering with what has been a golden goose.
Television ratings for the Vikings in recent years have been among the best in the league, according to the NFL and Scarborough Sports Marketing, a New York-based subsidiary of the Nielsen Company and Arbitron Inc., the media and advertising ratings giants.
And it goes beyond market share:
The percentage of Minnesotans who watched a game on television, attended a game or listened to one in a given year consistently tops 60 percent, said Bill Nielsen, vice president for sales at Scarborough Sports Marketing. “Over [the past] 11 years of data, the lowest [rating] was three-fifths of the market,” he said.
More importantly, Nielsen said, polling shows that Vikings fans fit the demographics most sought by television advertisers. “Vikings fans make more money per household than the total [Minnesota] market, their homes are worth more, they’re more likely to be employed full time, more likely to be college educated,” he said.
Read the whole thing; TV ratings don’t make the Vikings move-proof, by any means. But the Vikings are trying to shake up the voters with the threats (see teenager reference, above).
It all depends on what Zygi decides. If he can get what he wants, which is his Xanadu in Arden Hills, he will keep the team here. If he can’t get what he wants, he’ll probably sell the team. He could easily sell the team to a group that would move it to L.A.
While the NFL values the eyeballs, there are two things to remember:
The NFL really can’t block a move, because Al Davis beat them in court; and
If the Vikings were to move, it wouldn’t mean that all the eyeballs would turn away from the NFL. There are a lot of people who would watch football anyway, as the citizenry of Los Angeles has proven for nearly 20 years now.
If the lege won’t cooperate, and it shouldn’t, Vikings fans had better hope that a local ownership group is willing to buy Wilf out.
Yea, Mr. D, but even if LA watches football, they have proven that they will not support a local team. In fact, those same ratings show team popularity and no CA team even shows up until the Chargers at 13, followed by the Raiders at 19 and the 49ers at 22.