[81alum]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/busin...-espn.html

If this is paywalled for you, it is a distillation of a book by Ben Mathis-Lilly who examines the financial incentives to make the viewer experience terrible, and does so from the standpoint of a Michigan fan.  Harbaugh gets discussed.

https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/title...541700352/

Here are two paragraphs from the NYT article:

It is, let’s say, 8:43 p.m. on a Saturday. You are watching a college football game that is taking place at this hour despite being played in the Midwest in November, and the people in the stadium, which is not entirely full, look very cold and a little put off. The season schedule said kickoff was at 8 p.m., but it didn’t actually take place until 8:18. In the 25 minutes that have elapsed, play has been interrupted for three commercial breaks. Each advertisement shown during these breaks has been for pickup trucks.

....

One of the top ESPN-to-Fox personalities is a longtime radio host named Colin Cowherd, who once noted, in an almost admirably honest interview with Bryan Curtis of The Ringer, that “in my business, being absolutely, absurdly wrong occasionally is a wonderful thing.” He also said he constantly tells one of his friends in the industry that “there’s no money in right,” and concluded a rumination about whether he’d been wrong about the subject of that day’s show — his accusation that a particular quarterback didn’t prepare enough for games — by asking, “Who cares?”

As I read this article, I gained insight into my own dislike of both the TV experience and also the way that TV has ruined the at-the-game experience.  The free-market simply does not work well in this unique situation, because fandom is irrational and thus defies the normal laws of supply and demand.  For the market to work, millions of viewers would have to turn off their TVs as the experience worsened.  But they don't.  They would prefer to be miserable than to miss their team's games.  This seems a little more like feeding an addiction than selling toothpaste--or pickup trucks.  Or, as the byline on the article states: "It can still be hugely lucrative to provide an experience that fans come to despise."

[81alum]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/busin...-espn.html

If this is paywalled for you, it is a distillation of a book by Ben Mathis-Lilly who examines the financial incentives to make the viewer experience terrible, and does so from the standpoint of a Michigan fan.  Harbaugh gets discussed.

https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/title...541700352/

Here are two paragraphs from the NYT article:

It is, let’s say, 8:43 p.m. on a Saturday. You are watching a college football game that is taking place at this hour despite being played in the Midwest in November, and the people in the stadium, which is not entirely full, look very cold and a little put off. The season schedule said kickoff was at 8 p.m., but it didn’t actually take place until 8:18. In the 25 minutes that have elapsed, play has been interrupted for three commercial breaks. Each advertisement shown during these breaks has been for pickup trucks.

....

One of the top ESPN-to-Fox personalities is a longtime radio host named Colin Cowherd, who once noted, in an almost admirably honest interview with Bryan Curtis of The Ringer, that “in my business, being absolutely, absurdly wrong occasionally is a wonderful thing.” He also said he constantly tells one of his friends in the industry that “there’s no money in right,” and concluded a rumination about whether he’d been wrong about the subject of that day’s show — his accusation that a particular quarterback didn’t prepare enough for games — by asking, “Who cares?”

As I read this article, I gained insight into my own dislike of both the TV experience and also the way that TV has ruined the at-the-game experience.  The free-market simply does not work well in this unique situation, because fandom is irrational and thus defies the normal laws of supply and demand.  For the market to work, millions of viewers would have to turn off their TVs as the experience worsened.  But they don't.  They would prefer to be miserable than to miss their team's games.  This seems a little more like feeding an addiction than selling toothpaste--or pickup trucks.  Or, as the byline on the article states: "It can still be hugely lucrative to provide an experience that fans come to despise."