A trend was broken this year with the Men’s Final Four attendance figures, as the numbers increased substantially from the disasters in 2021 and 2022 in Hartford. TV ratings also took a substantial step up for the Men’s semifinals and finals, and I reached out to the NCAA to see how the Final Four viewings ended up, and they supplied this:

ESPN2

NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championships 05/27/2023 Sat 12:00 PM

Penn State vs Duke 313,496

ESPN2

NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championships 05/27/2023 Sat 3:06 PM

Notre Dame vs Virginia 322,622

ESPN

NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championships 05/29/2023 Mon 1:00 PM

Notre Dame vs Duke 756,979

ESPNU

NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championships 05/26/2023 Fri 3:00 PM

Denver vs Northwestern 36,478

ESPNU

NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championships 05/26/2023 Fri 6:30 PM

Boston College vs Syracuse 56,885

ESPN

NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Championships 05/28/2023 12:00 PM

Boston College vs Northwestern 315,997

Men’s D2 and D3 finals are held on the Sunday of championship weekend, and they always have fewer fans in the seats, although an ‘Event Pass’ includes all 3 days of coverage, so fans of D1 semifinals teams that lost are not as likely to use their Sunday tickets. Those games, ESPN broadcasts in the past, are only available on NCAA.com today. The Women’s D2 and D3 Final Fours are also only on NCAA.com.

Lacrosse TV ratings started to improve last year for the PLL, and while that is a cause to celebrate, the numbers still pale compared to a lot of other events. It’s sort of a conundrum for the lacrosse community given that someone like me sees this sport as being in the same place as MLS was 30 years ago and has very high hopes and expectations for the next 10-20 years. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in this sport that are looking at this past season as a satisfactory level of viewership/attendance, and they have certain facts to back that belief up.

It’s really sort of a matter of perspective and belief in how the future of the sport will evolve and eventually challenge for a place among the more followed sports. As someone who watched the old NASL NY Cosmos in the late 70’s I was witness to both the early surge in popularity of soccer in America, as well as the demise of that professional league. This is when parents started signing up their kids in droves and made the first incursion into the rise of the sport here. At a beginner’s level, the sport of soccer is fairly simple to understand and view, and back then the amount of strategic knowledge of the sport wasn’t widely known, as it wasn’t important to watching and enjoying.

Our sport does not have that luxury; we are watching not only a more sophisticated sport visually, but also when it comes to understanding equipment differences, rules differences (no other sport has such a substantial difference between the Boys and Girls rules, field layout, etc.) and even Box vs Field. It’s a much more lengthy learning process for those viewing.

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Fast forward from 1984 (the demise of the NASL) to 1993, as MLS is founded in conjunction with the successful USA bid to host the 1994 World Cup. The league did not even start until the 1996 season, so there was almost 2 years AFTER the World Cup before the first attempt to capitalize on the successful event. MLS struggled financially for a number of years, as the growth in popularity showed itself more ON THE FIELD among the youth, than in the stands and on TV.

That’s VERY similar to where we were with professional lacrosse under the MLL days.

Let’s take a step back to my teen years in the late 60’s and the 70’s. As a kid on Liong Island, we had access on TV to the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Rangers, etc. The Nets, Islanders and Devils were on their way or already in their infancy. All of them had TV outlets (albeit finding a home game on TV outside of baseball and football was a treat instead of a given – believe it or not, Game 7 of the Knicks-Lakers in the 1970 NBA Finals was blacked out in the NY area!).

What was interesting back then, and meaningful for today, is that we didn’t really have a big popularity difference between the major 3 sports (NHL was considered a distant 4th back then).

Yet now, we see ENORMOUS differences between interest and TV ratings for the three. Football has COMPLETELY overwhelmed the other two.

Why?

We can certainly note that Baseball, which is a very strategic game to those who play it, has seen a lot of audience leakage. Basketball, which has evolved into a game that has undergone a LOT of change since my youth in how the game is played due to the emergence of arguably the best athletes around, has seemed to lose a lot of their strategic approach in favor of a rapid pace on offense, including fast break 3-point shooting. There are times when watching an NBA game I have trouble deciding if I am watching the real thing or the latest NBA video game.

Football is also highly strategic. And not easy to fully grasp at its highest level. Yet the audience levels at games and on TV continues to hold at a high level.

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What happened to drive this?

In my opinion, the answer is simple. Football made a concerted effort over the years to SMARTEN THE AUDIENCE. They taught enough so that even a casual viewer can understand more than a small amount of information. And there is always ACCESS to more.

In it’s days of being America’s Pastime, Baseball was understood at a core level by most fans of it. When to bunt, steal, lefty-righty, etc. Many fans would PROUDLY KEEP SCORE on their scorecards. They could understand the SUBTLETY of strategy.

Somewhere, along the line, baseball disconnected from that. Rules changes actually eliminated a good chunk of the strategy. The Designated Hitter, the new extra innings rule, even Moneyball chipped away. Now we see an emphasis on home runs and strikeout ratios. When was the last time you saw your kid watch a game and fill out a scorecard?

Now look at Football.

Turn on the TV and you have all sorts of channels and talk shows that focus on football to a far higher degree than other sports. Ron Jaworski’s ESPN show over the years introduced the casual fan to film breakdown they never saw before; at a level that no other sport comes close to.

We have ‘Draft Experts’ seen throughout the year to educate us on those kids we might only see a little of, since many of them do not play in the SEC, B1G Ten, ACC, etc. We actually do a lot of mock drafts ourselves.

We KEEP LEARNING. The sport does NOT rely on personalities or star players to get our interest. We tune in to watch the TEAM and the UNIFORM, not just the players. If Saquon Barkley is injured, and he’s my favorite player, I still watch the Giants game that weekend.

Basketball relies more on names because the rosters/players on the court are only 5 at a time, their influence on the game is more likely than one football player does.

Lacrosse needs to take a page out of Football, and FAST.

And if you truly want your mind blown, here’s an excerpt from a 2021 article on the TV ratings for NCAA World Series Softball and Baseball (LINK)

“If head-to-head TV numbers operated under softball rules, then it would be a run-rule victory for the Women’s College World Series over the Men’s CWS.

The 2021 WCWS averaged 1.2 million viewers, which easily topped that men’s counterpart, which gathered 755,000 viewers on average.

Digging deeper, the WCWS Championship Series between Oklahoma and Florida State averaged 1.84 million TV viewers, which again easily topped the men’s version; the baseball championship series between Mississippi State and Vanderbilt averaged 1.15 million viewers.”

Yes, that’s correct. the 2021 Women’s Softball championship game between Oklahoma and Florida State drew 1 MILLION MORE VIEWERS than the ‘lauded’ Duke-Notre Dame game last Monday.

Just to keep you in perspective . . .

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Smartening the Audience

I’ve been watching this game for 46 years now; that’s not a small thing. Can I watch a game and dissect it pretty well? Certainly. It comes through in the writing and coaches know when I talk to them after the game that I’m not the stringer from the local newspaper asking the normal bland questions.

But if you ask me why should I string the stick a certain way, I’m CLUELESS. I didn’t play and I didn’t learn how and why. There are probably 12-year-olds who know more.

How many fans in the stands TRULY understand ‘warding off’? Based on the bellyaching from the stands . . . pretty much no one. Or when a glance to the helmet is not a penalty, even when yelled from the stands.

I would guess that many of the fans in the stands can give some sort of answer if I asked them the difference between 3 wideouts and a 2 tight-end set in football and why/when they are used. I doubt most of them could differentiate between the 3-3 and the 1-4-1 sets and what each offers. Heck, ask me about the Backer Zone for the women, or the reason two arcs exist instead of one, and I couldn’t answer correctly. After 46 years of being interested . . .

Over the summer, we are going to make a concerted effort to start to fill in the gaps for the readership but that’s not nearly enough.

This sport is so damn good to watch in it’s purest version, while knowing very little. Imagine how much better it gets if you understood it at a much higher level?

There are some places where the film breakdown occurs. The Flagler assistant coach, James Foote, has a number of videos on his Twitter to show some of the tactics. There’s Joe Keegan for PLL who does the same. It’s nowhere near enough. YouTube has some and we’ll be mining that too.

But it’s up to the lacrosse media . . . LacrosseTV, TLN, and yes, ESPN’s networks, that need to SUBSTANTIALLY step up their approach. And fans need to make the time, particularly if you have a child playing.

Many of the lacrosse world might be satisfied with this past Memorial Day.

I’m not and won’t be until we at least catch Women’s Softball . . . and even then, I’ll be striving for the next sport above.

And that brings me to another article I’m going to be writing . . . Should we be marketing the Women’s game more than the Men’s game to drive interest?

But that’s for another day.