Good day all. The controversy regarding the spoiled brat brigades in the NFL continues. The fans are ripping mad over the overpaid prima Donnas disrespecting the flag and the National Anthem, and are taking it out on the NFL and the networks that carry the games.
They are doing so by canceling subscriptions to cable and satellite game packages, not buying sports memorabilia and turning off the networks such as CBS that earn their bread and butter broadcasting the NFL games during the season. This is going to hit them right in the wallets and now some analysts are starting to think that the time has come to short media stocks. Here are the details from Bloomberg:
Can President Donald Trump’s attacks on the NFL tank media stocks? One Wall Street strategist says count on it.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Shawn Quigg is encouraging investors to bet against CBS Corp. stock ahead of this weekend’s NFL broadcasts. The bank recommends buying an option that gives you the right to sell the shares at $57.50 on the likelihood that the stock will fall below that price after the company discloses ratings for the games. CBS closed at $58 on Tuesday.
A side note. I dabble in the markets and have played around with the options they’ve talked about. My personal batting average is a big, fat goose egg. While the return on investment can be high, the risk is also quite high. If you want to do this, please contact a licensed expert who can explain this to you in excruciatingly painful detail.
Trump began encouraging fans last week to boycott NFL games, arguing that players were unpatriotic and should be fired for kneeling during the national anthem. The practice of going down on one knee during the anthem was started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a protest against police brutality and mistreatment of black Americans.
Colin Kaepernick is what is known as a “Free Agent.” This means any team can sign him to a contract and not have to make deals with other teams. Another term for this, at least in Kaepernick’s case is, unemployed. He is currently looking for a position calling the plays for the team at the local Burger King.
Fans didn’t follow the president’s pleas last weekend, when overall ratings were higher than a year earlier.
That was last week. This week, things have started to ramp up. One issue though, is season ticket holders. They’ve spent huge amounts for those tickets and the teams won’t take them back. On the flip side, DirecTV is allowing people to cancel their “NFL Season Ticket” service and get a refund. That is going to hurt both DirecTV and the NFL.
So far, media investors don’t appear worried. Shares of CBS, which said ratings for last Sunday’s games were up 4 percent from a year earlier, have changed little this week. JPMorgan analyst Alexia Quadrani has an “overweight,” or buy rating, on CBS, with a target price of $75.
There are other indicators that need to be examined. These are the shirts and other NFL junk people buy.
Quigg also cited NFL jersey sales to see whether fans are souring on the sport.
“NFL-related revenue is not trivial to CBS, and any decline in NFL viewership related to the National Anthem debate may negatively affect future results,” he said in a note to investors Wednesday. “We view this weekend’s viewership results as a cleaner proxy in determining whether the Anthem debate may be a larger issue for the NFL, and CBS, or not.”
One of the things that’s been happening is sales of some jerseys have actually skyrocketed.
Quigg noted that the jersey of Alejandro Villanueva — the only Pittsburgh Steeler to stand on the field during the national anthem during last weekend’s game — was the best-selling jersey in the hours following the player boycott.
Right up until he put his foot into it by letting his coach browbeat him into apologizing. Still, he did stand and that is what counts. As for all the losers? People aren’t buying the jerseys, they’re burning them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AbZrMQjGrE
“If one uses player jersey sales as a proxy, fans appear to favor an on-field standing presence during the Anthem,” he said in the note.
While some might view the controversy as a short-term threat to ratings, another week of lackluster viewership this weekend could “mobilize investors to take the potential impact more seriously,” the bank said.
The “Threat” to the bottom line of the NFL and the networks is real, but it also depends a lot on how pissed off the fans are. While American sports fans aren’t quite as nutty as soccer fans in other countries, they can go off the deep end from time to time.
However, these are also people who helped elect Donald Trump, and who really are very patriotic. These knee bending bozo’s, in the minds of many people, have made it to the big time and are pissing all over the country that not only let them get there, they encouraged them. If the fans stay away from the NFL, it’s going to hurt. Only time will tell.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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And let us not forget that the ones driving the narrative, the liberal metrosexual males and all the Social Justice Warriors and their ilk, are not, shall we say, part of the rabid fan base that has made the NFL king of the U.S. spectator sports. For them it doesn’t matter. To them it’s as Mooch Obozo said, “all that for a flag?”
Don’t know how to get the numbers but gut feeling tells me that there’s a huge difference in percentage of Trump voters that follow NFL versus non-Trump voters (I won’t mention her name and raise bile in your throat; you’re welcome).