Iliketurtles;898523 wrote:6 out of the top 7 are baseball teams and the first 5 are baseball thats even worse.
As for the Lions and Bucs I feel like they don't belong on that list and they will start to get fans because the teams are going to be doing better. I'd say the only NFL team I would ever think of putting on a list like this is the Raiders(yes I know they are there at 12).
The key is LOSING fans. It's not ranking teams already in bad shape (although many of them are). The premise of the article, was to look at a 10-year span and see the drastic difference. Clearly, in 2001 the Indians were at the height of their popularity and at the tail-end of a very competitive, popular time. It's no shock that combined with their current demise and things coming back to earth a bit that their percentage is going to be the highest. With the Raiders, they make the list because they have slowly dropped in popularity since the 80's and 90's, but compared to other franchises (Jaguars, Panthers, Texans, Bengals, some others), they are still similar. Those teams just never really had the high numbers to result in a drastic drop-off. What I find interesting however, is teams like the Lions, Pirates and a few others have been historically bad, were back in 2000 and have still managed to drop in percentage since then.
However, given the structure of the NFL, I find it hard to believe any NFL team is going to really be in the bad shape that some of the bottom-feeding baseball franchises are in. It's just too popular and too much league-run instead of franchise-run to really become as bad as say the Pirates or Marlins.