Opinion: Boycott the Bowl

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Another Super Bowl, another year on the sidelines for Los Angeles. There is zero impetus among NFL owners to move a team to L.A. or create a local expansion franchise, largely because they don’t want to play ball with a city that refuses to kick in hundreds of millions in public money to build a modern stadium. And why should they? Angelenos are still watching football on TV even if they don’t have a local team, or so the theory goes. One wonders if last week’s Super Bowl ratings bear it out.

Super Bowl XL got a national rating of 42.6, and a share of 64. In Los Angeles, it got a 33.5 rating, 60 share. The rating is the percentage of TV-owning households watching a show, while the share represents the percentage of TVs in use that are tuned to that particular program. This means that a lot less people in L.A. were watching TV on Sunday than in the rest of the country, but of those who were, about the same percentage were watching the Super Bowl. The discrepancy is a little sharper than last year, when the national rating was 41.0 with a 60 share, while in Los Angeles it was a 34.2 rating and a 61 share. That may be because last year’s game featured a West Coast team, the Seattle Seahawks. Or it may be because Angelenos are giving up on pro football, and increasingly have better things to do.

Ratings aside, it’s hard to imagine that the absence of a local team will have no effect on support for the NFL in the nation’s second-biggest TV market. The owners’ need for immediate gratification in the form of public subsidies is going to have a long-term impact on their bottom line. The best advice for local football fans who want to send that message might be to stop watching football.