I've spent the past three days writing, and needed to zone out, so I turned on the Colts-Bears pre-season game. It absolutely stunk, and after the first quarter most of the starters were gone.
As it happens, a student of mine, Jason Berkowitz, did some regressions of how well the preseason predicted the real season. The answer is that it doesn't--a team's winning percentage in the preseason has almost no predictive power of regular season fortunes.
So the question is--why do fans pay full ticket prices to see these fake games? It is not like spring training in baseball, when going to games in in part an excuse to get away from the cold north. I know this is not the most important issue facing the NFL today, but after watching that game, I just had to wonder....
The easy answer is that the teams bundle the preseason tickets with the regular season tickets. The harder question is why don't the owners raise regular season ticket prices and unbundle the preseason tickets? I read somewhere that the players don't get paid for the preseason games so that might have something to do with it. Then again wouldn't the players union take this into account when negotiating the basic agreement with the owners? Hmm, this could go on all day...
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