With the NFL draft behind us we thought it would be an appropriate time to run a Fan Optimism Score™ survey to determine what teams’ fans are most excited about the upcoming season, and what fans are already on their proverbial fourth drink before the season has even seen its first kickoff.
ESPN, one of the most recognizable names in sports entertainment, has had a rough year, with millions dropping their subscriptions and a massive layoff of some of their top talent.
Netflix, on the other hand, one of the most popular services in the world, just hit a major milestone: 100 million subscribers as of earlier this year.
The beginning of the MLB season always brings a lot of false hope that quickly fades to cynicism, but also plenty of hopelessness that can quickly turn into pleasant surprises. Things are often very rocky in the first few months of rankings, with balance restoring itself later. That of course makes these the most entertaining rankings as things change so drastically early in the season.
We wanted to see what states had the most valuable sports teams, so we pulled data on individual team values for the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS and added them together in each state. You can see the full value of each state’s sport teams in the map and graph below:
Own a professional sports team?
Neither do we.
But we wanted to see what the average values are of each league. We pulled data from Forbes, who tracks sport teams valuations, and ran the averages for each team. It should come as no surprise that the NFL is atop the list, with the league growing its audience over the past decade. We were a little surprised to see MLB second on the list.
A million here, a million there.
Professional sports contracts can seem massive, no matter the league, but we wanted to see what sport often ends up paying out the most in their top deals, especially relative to total league revenue. While the NFL has been a dominant force in US sports for the past decade for total league revenue, it was interesting to see how low their top 10 guaranteed contracts are compared to the NBA and MLB.
For some teams, it’s part of the strategy, take a lot of swings, don’t worry too much about striking out, the resulting hits will balance everything out. Others, they just don’t have the power to really take successful cracks at the ball.
We wanted to see what teams average the most strikeouts on offense per game, so we pulled data on the past five seasons (2012-2016) to determine who ended up walking back to the dugout empty-handed the most. Below you will find a breakdown of average strikeouts per team over the last five seasons, and a chart below that shows the five year average of every team as well.
Among the several issues the NFL has faced in the press over the past few years, none have been as impactful as concussion data.
We wanted to see which NFL teams had the most concussions during games and which teams had the least. Using data from NFL injury reports as well as cross-referencing with third party NFL data providers, we broke down each team’s total reported in-game concussion count below.
Baseball is only a few months away, just in time for the winter to turn to spring, meaning it’s time to start getting excited about spring training news heating up alongside the weather.
In order to determine just how excited every fan base is for the 2017 MLB season, we put together a SportFacts Optimism Score for each team.
It’s always tremendous fun to remind ourselves just how many times DeMarcus Cousins has been called for a technical foul over the past few years.
But we wanted to dig a little deeper so we thought it would be interesting to make an NBA “All-Technical Foul” team by sourcing data on the total number of technical fouls per player in each position. We pulled data over the past five seasons and added it up for all currently starting players. Below you’ll find the starting team (and their backups in italics).