I am writing this from a hotel room on the Vegas strip, overlooking the gorgeous mountain range out here, my body aching from its first trip to the so-called city of sin. I go home tomorrow, and while this was an unforgettable experience that I will cherish, I need to go home. Las Vegas is incredible but it also the most unserious place I have ever seen in my entire life. Everything in my body somehow both feels good and hurts at the same time. I get how this city can drive people mad.
I came here to watch my beloved Denver Broncos who I need to quickly apologize to for my sports blogging belligerence from earlier this season and eat some crow and do the Happy Gilmore “I’m stupid, you’re smart” speech. I said this offense “was the worst I can remember watching in my 37 years as a Denver Bronco fan” and it really was, but boy howdy was I way out over my skis implying that Bo Nix is a bust and Sean Payton is a relic of a different era (he’s still an asshole though). I am fully Nix-pilled now and will fight anyone who says mean things like what I have previously said about a guy I watched be the best player on a field with Maxx Crosby on it on Sunday.
But this isn’t another Broncos blog, it’s about how a group of orange clad maniacs really made me understand a larger truth about the NFL on Sunday, punctuated by my buddy talking about the fall of home field advantage and sparking this take. Denver was playing in Las Vegas, but if I blindfolded you and took you into the stadium and made you judge it on sound, you would have thought you were somewhere a lot closer to Colorado.
One of the consequences of ripping a team from its community and moving it elsewhere is that it by definition becomes less connected to the community. The Las Vegas Raiders are an import from California, and by moving further away from original Raiders fans in Oakland and Los Angeles and closer to Broncos fans, they have helped provide Denver with an extra home game every year.
Home field advantage in the NFL has long been slipping. Las Vegas oddsmakers notoriously used to award an automatic 3-point advantage for home teams, but that number now is closer to 2 or less for the majority of the league. It has reached a point where it’s fair to question whether home field advantage is a phrase from a different era. While there are various culprits for this change that you could just describe as human evolution, like the widespread advances in sports science and understanding how travel affects the body and being smarter about when to fly to road games, I believe the root of this is a fundamental change in the NFL gameday experience.
“You’re not getting the types of crowds you have in the past,” former Washington Football Team Head Coach Ron Rivera said to The Washington Post after the 2021 season. “Hopefully if [the pandemic] ever does ease up and we know how to deal with it, it may change things.”
While the pandemic changed the whole world in ways we’re only really beginning to understand, the difference in the crowd that Rivera described was already well on its way to the league by 2020. The NFL is now a luxury commodity, and like so many things in America these days, has eschewed its more working-class roots in the perpetual chase for more and more profits at all cost. NFL ticket prices have risen 39 percent since 2013, more than the rate of inflation (31 percent). Concessions have trended in the same direction too, and the price for a family of four to attend an NFL game, park, eat some food and drink some beer can cost around $800 in cities like Las Vegas.
Which means that the rowdy crowds of yore have given way to more cosmopolitan ones. That doesn’t mean that fans are sitting on their hands during NFL games, both Raiders and Broncos fans on Sunday were very loud with dueling “RAIIIIDERRRRRRSSS!” and “Let’s go Broncos” chants all throughout the afternoon, but there were dueling roaring chants at a Raiders home game! John Madden’s ghost must be so thankful that he only had to put up with a year of this shit. Us Broncos fans were so loud I swear I saw the Raiders snap the ball on a silent count once.
The growth of the secondary ticket market has brought more visiting fans like me and my buddy and our once-a-year Broncos road game into all home stadiums everywhere, but if that were the singular explanation for the change in NFL crowds that NFL lifer Ron Rivera described, we would have seen it before 2018 when home team win percentages fell from around 60 percent to around 52 percent.
In 2014, the San Francisco 49ers moved to Santa Clara, which can take an hour and a half to drive to for fans in the city that bears the team’s name. In 2016, the St. Louis Rams were hijacked by Stan Kroenke and taken to Los Angeles, a city they hadn’t played in since 1994. Anyone who watched last night’s Sunday Night Football game saw the same dynamic I saw in Vegas with that raucous Philadelphia crowd in LA.
In 2017, the San Diego Chargers joined the Rams in Los Angeles, serving as their tenant the following year. I highlight these examples to demonstrate the tectonic shift at hand here. The NFL, like all things in our hyper-capitalist collapsing empire, is chasing dollars wherever that takes them and fundamentally altering itself towards an entity where that is its sole purpose. Bringing joy and a feeling of community as you and 75,000 of your closest friends tell Patrick Mahomes to go pound sand is now an afterthought at best. That community is actually leverage to the NFL, as the billionaire owners use the love we have for our sports teams to steal money from the public to pay for these palatial stadiums they build to welcome in visiting fans who are willing to pay a price for a unique experience the locals won’t or can’t. Every new NFL stadium has more private boxes than the previous one now, and if you told me that by 2080 NFL stadiums would only be made of luxury suites, I’d believe you.
The Washington Commanders are trying to move back to Washington D.C. by 2030 at the site of their old RFK Stadium, as a Senate committee just helped in a big way last week by passing a 17-2 vote granting the city long-term ownership of the property. Sports Illustrated wrote that Washington sees it as the “ideal location for a modern stadium to host its NFL team,” and it absolutely is. I cannot think of a better place for the NFL to put one of its crown jewels than in a wildly expensive city with people from all over the world that is defined by elite out of touch bureaucrats who are helping to actively price most Americans out of society.