Definitely hurts flames ratings due to such late start times, not only to capture eastern viewers but people in the west as well. To stay up to 11 to watch a hockey game in the middle of the week will hurt ratings no doubt

Hmmm? :)

Did you bookmark my golf/NASCAR comment or something? That was very quick.

The first round of the Masters had 293K on Thursday, equal to your standard Blue Jays regular season game in April. The Blue Jays televise 162ish games a year, versus one Masters First Round a year. :hmmm:

The difference between the Masters and the Raptors is that the Raptors are playing multiple games over multiple windows over multiple weeks this post season. The Masters only happens once a year. Sample sizes.

My comment about NASCAR was not unfounded, and although we don't have numbers for Canada we do have plenty of figures for the States. The race last weekend in Richmond, as an example, tied the lowest rating for a Cup Series race on broadcast TV since at least 2000. [Source] It's on an incredible decline. Races the past few weeks garnerning 2.5M viewers south of the border used to have 6M viewers a few years ago. Broadcasts of some of their races have halved over the past half decade, and their crowds are worse.

Figures like this are why NASCAR is attempting to change its schedule, change its playoff format, and in general doing whatever it can to right its ship.

No, I just remembered it because it was a stupid comment and I wasn`t even considering NASCAR. Don`t worry, no one can take your title of fastest googler in the west (information relevant or not) :)

How was it a stupid comment, though? The ratings for this year's Masters were without question bolstered by Tiger, but one bump doesn't make up for what has been a steady decline in interest.

There is only one Masters, but there are a tonne of golf tournaments throughout the year on TSN/CTV and some people watch on US channels. Despite an early morning start, the Masters drew an audience of 1.15 million on TSN/CTV and nearly 11 million on CBS in the US. Replay drew another 4 million in the afternoon.

Golf's aging tv demographic is a problem, but when Tiger is competing for a title going into the weekend, the link to increased tv ratings is undeniable. One of the primary reasons and perhaps the most important factor in declining golf ratings the past half decade or longer has been the absence of Woods and the decline in his game. With his recent resurgence casual golf fans are more likely to tune in.

If golf does not have another Tiger-like player emerge in the next half-decade then its likely it will revert to a familar status of the 80s and early 90s when Jack Nicklaus was in decline and no suitable heir to the throne emerged...merely a series of good to excellent golfers that were with overhyped by the media or never lived up to the hype.

Jordan Spieth looked like the heir apparent a few years ago, winning 11 tournaments and 4 majors by the time he was 24, but has struggled mightily since then. If he can become dominant and fulfill his potential, golf just might have their next big thing and ratings should remain decent for the next 10 - 15 years.

Speaking of NASCAR, what is going on over there? I never paid much attention to it, but it seemed like in the mid 90s it went through explosive growth with new tracks, new events and lots of money. By Y2K it was practically ubiquitous in the United States, and there was even a bit of a Canadian fanbase emerging from what I recall at the time. Then maybe about a decade ago it started losing steam and now it's back to where it was in the 80s, as a bit of a niche regional sport. The sudden rise and fall of NASCAR was pretty dramatic.

The uptick is certainly thanks to Tiger and for the Canadian numbers I think some can come down to Conners qualifying at the last minute and making the cut. Weir's been golfing for years but hasn't really been very relevant since he won his Masters, at least IMO. Conners probably moved the needle a bit.

Probably. As you've mentioned the PGA has tried to get younger players more in the spotlight (McIlroy, Spieth) in the absence of Tiger to varying degrees of success. Anecdotally a lot of people I know who were watching the Masters were watching for Tiger - not because they like golf. If he drives the needle then so be it, but eventually the sport has to do something to be compelling once he finally does retire. At least they've moved more towards on-screen technologies such as ball tracking.

A good question and one that probably doesn't have a simple answer. As mentioned, the tracks are monotonous, the drivers boring and plain featuring the same rotating cast of winners, and a points/scoring system which NASCAR has tried to implement and change with limited success. It's not the glory days of the 90s when Earnhardt was wiping guys out and Gordon was cruising to victory. It's so much more....tame, compared to what it used to be.

I don't generally think it's an overarching issue with motorsports as a whole. IndyCar still does well, and F1 is seeing some of its best American figures ever (and the Montreal GP routinely does well and is a favourite on the international calendar). F1 is routinely at the forefront of new technologies and I think that may be something that NASCAR is lacking in.

NASCAR had a lot of success because of the personalities in the drivers seats. Like JHikka alluded to, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, and even the lesser guys like Dale Jarrett, Mark Martin, the Wallace brothers, Dale Earnhardt Jr., drew a big following because of their personas. The Will Farrell movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby sort of epitomized what made NASCAR a draw - the personalities of all these racers from the deep south with their southern drawl just going at it with each other. In elementary school I had NASCAR bedsheets, just like John Tavares had Toronto Maple Leafs sheets :haha: and my Halloween costume in grade 2 was a Mark Martin racing uniform. I even had the games for PS1 and Xbox later on.

Despite all of that, I couldn't tell you the name of one NASCAR driver today if my life depended on it.

The joke about watching guys turn left for 4 hours rings true. It's just not entertaining. They've tried different points and standings systems to little avail. The issue is just that there aren't any real compelling story lines.

Look at other sports: the NBA is a real life soap opera. This player disses that player, or Drake says X about some jackarse playing for Philly or Detroit and bam, you have a story line. In golf, everyone wants to see if Tiger can make a run at Jack Nicklaus' 18 majors. The PGA did a decent job of marketing McIlroy, Spieth, Dustin Johnson, Ricky Fowler, and a few others as the new guys on the block and tried to really make a big deal out of who was going to dominate the rest, and it was kind of compelling. With Tiger, there was a 50/50 chance he'd win every tournament it seemed, but then it became really interesting to see what would happen (I'm a golf fan). The NFL is a circus that culminates with a gameday every Sunday afternoon and offers a great college drinking excuse on Thursdays (I was in law school when they started Thursday nighters, and man were those ever fun nights). MLB and NHL remain the most focused on the actual on field/ice product I think.

NASCAR has become stagnant. The tracks are almost all the same or similar (ie: left turns) and there aren't any real compelling storylines for the average Joe to feel compelled to tune in. In sports, your competing for the entertainment dollar and if you aren't appealing to the casual fan you aren't going to succeed. It's why the NHL struggles in non-traditional markets and why baseball stadiums sit 75% empty when the team struggles.

Sportsnet PR
@sportsnetpr
Think Canada was pumped to see #VladJr make his @MLB debut? An average of 909,500 Canadians tuned in to watch the @BlueJays on Friday, making it the most-watched game this season. Overall, the #BlueJays series win over the #Athletics reached 4 million fans across Canada

-----

The Jays' game on Saturday registered an average of 643K viewers.

Too bad Shapiro and Atkins completely botched the last 2 years and have hampered the chances of building a decent team around him anytime soon. I think it'll be awhile before we see anything close to 2015/16 numbers.

Indeed. The high from Friday for the Vlad Jr. game was the average for games in 2015 & 2016. :hmmm:

It's a shame. Even if you don't like baseball, you can't deny the energy that existed in the city during those couple summers when they seemed like contenders.

Not a chance when these millenials age and turn into yuppies it'll simply go from being a trend on the left to both sides of the isle.

Pearl Clutching has always been a staple in society. We had a brief reprieve from it because the pearl clutching of the past conflicted with consumerism and because it was tied so heavily in with Christianity.

Social justice advocacy is turning into a religion faster than most people realize. Some of the more idiotic elements will mature but your crazy if you think it's going away.

Without a religious tradition its inevitable.

It's bloody rare when you actually find a person who is properly disinterested.


The same conservatives fighting against it are the same types of people who will be for it in a generation or two.

Pearl clutching is something every society has, the luck we had was that previously it was all associated with christianity.

Your seeing people like Mike Pence who themselves are supporting this activity by having a rule where he won't be alone with woman.

The dirty secrets of SJW's is that pretty much everyone supports it from time to time.

There was a brief time between the 1960s and the late 90s where one could avoid this narrative and that was only because the pill create the biggest generation gap in all of human history.


Back to the point just as christians literally rewrote the history books(and retroactively tried to turn every cultural artifact christian, SJWs will do the same.

Were far too gone, I'm at the point tht I'm totally fatalistic about it. Were going back to a cultural framework that is more like the 1950s than we want to admit.

The metrics are simple SJWing is universally accepted by all classes. The rich like being able to differentiate themselves from the lower classes, poor minorities get their statuses, and majority poor get to have their voting power centralized under a social identity of simply being poor.

Offensive naming conventions are gone, anything that doesn't follow the SJW philosophy will be pushed aside.

The problem with social values is that the there is rarely a counter movement that is both interested enough in social norms and paradoxially at the same time fighting to keep them free to make a difference.

But don't worry the concussion issue is gonna due far more damage to sports than anything else.

We are becoming a hyper sensitive society and this will only increase year by year unless we face some serious crisis.

Considering the rates of crime associated with Alcohol, the risk of drunk driving(unless there is actually no tailgates at these parties), the physical health risks associated with it, and the legal fact that you loose your ability to consent to your own behavior, alcohol is not gonna become liberalized.

Prohibition was an entirely different era in our history.

Society as a whole is far better at fighitng corruption, in addition were a society that is far better at factually understanding the issues associated with the drug.

Pot wasn't legalized because people deserve more freedom, it was legalized because alcohol is a far better drug to penalize.

Ironic considering you use the words a "climate of outrage".

How long is it before the Oilers get attacked for its association with global warming deniers.

I take it as a decade max before the Oilers become the Edmonton Solars.

I wish I were joking but I am most certainly not.

My impression is that, isolated liberalization measures aside, we're pretty close to the "high water mark" when it comes to the place of alcohol in society.

It's pretty much peaked at the level it's gonna peak, and the broader trend will be a slow decline in its social acceptability. For the reasons you've given and other changes happening society.

Already it seems to be slowly retreating quickly from anything work-related like business lunches, company picnics or retirement lunches. Whereas it used to be commonplace at such functions.

I think the deal breaker is the nature of the drug. It isn't as inherently addictive as more destructive drugs. It gathers a large degree of its issues from social norms.

It's completely acceptable by more than a few to act in ways that are virtually unacceptable on any other type of drug.

Alcohol is 100 percent a social drug, which is largely why it is tolerated and by the same paradox while it is such a plight on society.

I literally think it's worst than cocaine or heroin directly because it wouldn't remotely be an issue if it were treated like the drug it factually is.

Virtually everyone I've ever met has had their worst moments in their life attached to the drug.

Whether it be sexual assault, family conflict, injuries induced, dollars wasted, fights, etc etc.

I've only met a handful of non drinkers who have much of a tolerance for the drug or atleast being around people who use the drug. Again it only gets by because its considered to be a social drug.

Can't say that's my experience. Startup culture and attracting millenial talent has put an emphasis on keeping people in the office with perks like alcohol. Having a beer on tap at the workplace would have been unheard of before 2000. Now it's a staple at every WeWork office and numerous legit startups. I see pictures from friends who work in tech or marketing firms who have scotch tastings every month at the office. Actually I remember walking into Ubisoft's 900 employee office in Toronto and seeing a row of a hundred or so empty whiskey bottles in the employee cafeteria from such events.

Hell, even my comparably stuffy job in capital markets has a cooler of beers dropped off every Friday in the summer that we usually start drinking at 3pm. I think maybe the stereotypical image of the lawyer in a 3-piece suit going out for a boozy lunch is fading, but alcohol in the physical workplace is reaching new heights and I love it.

That's interesting. Thanks for the counterpoint.