Business Insight Zone

Sometimes I think I talk too much about sports on this blog, although I always try to make a strong connection from the business standpoint. This Silicon Alley Insider post from Michael Learmonth reminds me why sports is so very important to cover from a business perspective:

Why The Networks Pay Billions For Football

TV networks (along with DirectTV) are paying the NFL a collective $3.7 billion a year for the right to show their games. Are they getting their money’s worth?

Yes, says Campbell Mithun media buyer/columnist John Rash. In fact, it could be argued pro football is propping up the network TV business. Without the NFL, both CBS and NBC are down (11% and 22% respectively) in 18-49 y/y. . . .

Besides that “pure” business orientation, here are two more reasons why I cover sports so much:

1. The personal angle: I confess, my serious sports fan mother (and knowledgeable sports fan father) raised a serious sports fan. Even though I spend far less time than I used to watching sports — and refuse to subscribe to cable television for fear that I would spend every night of the baseball season watching a game — I’m still wired to absorb it relentlessly.
2. The business/cultural angle: It’s often been noted that sports can provide a lingua franca for people who otherwise have little in common to talk about. So there’s that. But there’s also the reality that sports — with its hard-edged standards of success and failure, excellence and inadequacy — can offer ripe pickings for management metaphors. Yes, this can be overdone, especially if the boss is, say, a rabid football fan and members of his team don’t share that love. But if there is a shared language there, sports can be very useful for boiling down concepts and showing them in more naked simplicity.

So, that’s my apologia for continuing to talk about sports. But I’ll understand if the non-sports-fans in the audience skip those posts.