One of my BIL watched the 85 SB between Pats and Bears and he liked the Pats unis and logo for some reason. He was a kid after all. And he's stuck with them since. Their dynasty is the cherry on top. He watches every game possible and will PVR it if he's at work. Same with Leafs.

However, he only went to his first Pats game like four years ago when a supplier at his job offered four club seat tickets to him at the 50 yard line. He'd have to pay for transpiration and boarding. He ended up taking his family and also watching a Bruins game.

My other BIL likes the Ravens since their first SB. He was about 12. Just liked the cool name and colours. He's got the jersey and bobbleheads and hats. But he's not diehard.

Judging by the number of Pats decals I see on cars, their fan base up here's gotta be 95% bandwagoners.

Hard to blame anyone for being on the Pats bandwagon... if you're going to bandwagon for anyone, it might as well be for them.

I never paid much attention to the NFL but when I was a kid the Pats were a joke team, almost like the Browns or Lions. The level of success they've enjoyed since would have been unfathomable back then.

One would think a normal person would have a connection with their home team and some interest in others, not exclude their home team and only support others. At this site I'm one of the few who thinks that way :)

I am a Bears fan I chose them when I was young as my NFL team because they always had amazing defense that was so good it compensated for their lack of good Quarterback play. Also because they have such a rich history and lunch pale no nonsense playing philosophy.

I don't think it's a matter of someone being "normal". A lot of people support their home team because of hometown pride, but it's not a mandatory part of fandom. It's sports; people can like who they like.

That said, go Riders.

No, it's not mandatory but the action is normal or routine, for the most part.

This is the reasoning I used when I voted in the last federal election.

Gridiron will be facing a general downward trend in the near future anyway as youth participation deteriorates and holes start showing through in the regional displacement of participation. In the US, the sport is moving in a downward trend in high schools as the other sports more-or-less maintain or, in the case of soccer as one example, increase. Although TV ratings for the NFL continue to be strong there is beginning to be holes in raw attendance at games (Cincinnati, Washington, Tampa, as three examples). The NFL should take a page from the NBA's book and begin looking at ways to make the season more interesting. Obviously this isn't a five year window of downward trending but more like a ten or twenty year window.

In Canada, because the CFL has to go up against both the NFL and NCAA, the effect is magnified. Weaker competitions generally falter first, and that means in a place like Toronto interest in the NFL will more or less continue at the expense of the CFL - if one is going to decline it will be the naturally weaker product. Fans of a sport will always gravitate to whatever the top tier of that sport is, and in this case it's the NFL. Most gridiron fans I know in Toronto are either Bills or Browns fans. Obviously in a place like Winnipeg or Regina, which have much more history and a closer local tie to gridrion, these teams will persist through most of these downward trends. It'll be the larger markets that should worry the CFL moving forward.

I think there would be a lot of variables at play but Toronto could reasonably get 50K out for eight games a year. One of those variables would be stadium & location, which I think would be a big determining factor in getting people out. NFL stadiums are like a 25/75 urban/suburb split, so a stadium in North York seems more likely than a stadium downtown. It depends on if you think most of your fanbase is commuting in from the GTA outskirts or the city proper, and I would bet a large sum of money that most gridiron fans would be coming in from places like Oshawa, Oakville, and Newmarket than Toronto proper.

Everyone loves a championship bandwagon.

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You think there's no connection, but there usually is. Sometimes that connection is simply really liking the talents of a specific player on that team. Or it could be the performance of the whole team which attracts them. It could be the uniforms, logos or team name - or any combination of them. It could be because they know someone in that city. Or the team is owned by a person who runs another company they like. There are plenty of reasons to have a connection other than just being from or close to that city.

I'm a Steelers fan. It was because the Steelers were the toughest team in the NFL and they had a very lunch-pale essence to them - partially because they're in a city that was the steel-city capital of the US... which basically felt like Hamilton. It almost felt like a home team. But make no mistake - I'm a fan of the team, not the city. I love the Steelers but absolutely hate the Penguins.

About 25 of the 32 NFL teams I personally know someone in Southern Ontario who is a fan of one of them.

Painting your car with team colours/logos... I don't give a crap who/where that teams is - that's just stupid.

I'm a Steelers fan as well, and as near as I can figure out why is because when I was a kid, we used to get our networks on cable in London from Erie PA (as well as Detroit, but I watched the Erie stations more). I used to watch Erie news, I knew who all the car dealers were there, I knew that annoying friggin lawyer who "we don't charge a fee unless we get money for you" as he pointed at the camera. And they talked Steelers a lot, and I liked Terry Bradshaw. And Terry is mainly why I choose Fox football pregames today.

In other words, Toronto would be drawing the same amount as Cincinnati and Tampa, two teams you highlighted as being struggling cities for the league. But I think that is a spot on prediction. An NFL team in Toronto would never be a 75K attraction.

I think they'd be able to get a consistent 60k. 75k is doubtful outside of playoffs, but if Toronto were ever to get a new stadium - it would be domed and probably only have a max capacity of 60k or so anyway. Something similar to Ford Field in size and modesty.

In any case, they'd be turning a profit regardless because of the TV deal the NFL has.

The 3rd most populated metro in NA would get an attendance worthy of last place in the NFL. All at the same time as people predict, like yourself, football will become irrelevant in 20 yrs. The discussion of TO getting an NFL team should end there.

May as well setup shop then in Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, as I’m sure that they’d all get close to the numbers you’d predict for Toronto. And even if they don’t, they’d still be turning a profit regardless because of the TV deal the NFL has... that’s how it works, right?

That struck me as contradictory as well.

It's a tough row to hoe when they want to pretend they're not trying to kill one brand of football while at the same time keeping another. Good to see someone else questioning that "logic"

TV deal pays about a billion per team over 8 years. Salary cap is projected to be $200m per team in 2020. TV deal is great for those already owning a team. When you have to spend over 3 billion to buy a team and build a stadium, the numbers get a little more difficult.

The difference being that these markets used to attract more than 50K and do not anymore. In New York, and a few other markets, season seat holders are trying to sell their PSLs at a loss and cannot because their market value is so low and the market is flooded. The Redskins have lost something like 15K in average in the last few years.

My prediction for Toronto's 50K wasn't so much that it could only support that but that building a stadium any larger than that will be foolish. In-game NFL attendance is not trending upwards, so why would you build a 75K seat stadium when it's less likely to be full? Create ticket scarcity off the hop by using a 50K stadium. This would mean that Toronto could charge more for their 50K tickets than Cincinnati or Tampa could. Theoretically, anyway.

It's still an extremely in-demand product even with a potential for falling off in the medium to long-term future. Similar to the CFL, the NFL is reaching abroad to try to find a larger player base (and revenues...). The NFL has an academy set up in the UK to try to find additional players and will look to eventually host a Super Bowl in the UK. They need international players because their US numbers are not holding steady and need to find additional revenues internationally.

Anyway, Toronto could support a team but it likely wouldn't be worth the cost of both the team and the stadium.

There are over 1 million American kids who play tackle football every year in the U.S. in high school. There was a 3% drop in participation yes but that still mean a massive amount of players every year to scout and choose from to get into the college ranks every year. Gridiron football will not die it will just have to evolve and may eventually mean tackling switches to a more rugby type style and helmets may be eliminated as they are more of a safety hazard and weapon than an actual safety mechanism.

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