The NFL secret to success

What a country! You can actually deliver news of impending labor strife more than 1000 days in advance and get a huge amount of publicity. Name me another sports league in this universe who has that type of maniacal fan base where there would be even remote interest. That's the NFL for you. In your face, 24/7/365, and proud of it.

I'm just simply amazed. I mean heck, we're not even discussing the 2011 ACC basketball recruiting classes yet and the NFL can hold our attention 3 years in advance. Roger Goodell runs the most finely tuned machine in sports.

Think about this: His league has been in the headlines for many of the wrong reasons over the past 12 months. Spygate, Pacman Jones, Drugs, The Bengals, etc...

But for a league that has had to deal with so many off-field issues, I find their hold on the sporting public to be nothing short of astonishing. I think there are two basic reasons for all of this and frankly it's simple economics. Supply and demand.

First, there are only 16 regular season games to keep our attention on a weekly basis. Every game means something which in other leagues tends to take months to figure out. In the NFL, every game is of monumental importance. In other leagues, fans feel as though they can take a night off. In the NFL, you have to have your game face on every week as a fan.

The second reason the NFL dominates its competition is that they somehow have made the calendar important for their product year round. Playoffs run from January into February, along with the scouting combine and free agent acquisitions. March-April is the draft and next years schedule release.

A schedule release!

Stop the presses!

Can you believe that, we're enthralled by the league releasing its schedule?

In May its rookie mini-camps and labor discussion. June is passing camp and full squad mini camp. July-August it's training camp and pre-season and then finally we get to games starting in September. Think about that for a minute. 8 months without a game and we can talk NFL until the cows come home.

Other leagues have tried but have failed miserably in emulating the NFL's year round approach. The NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball all have not been able to mimic the NFL's approach because the NFL is a product so intertwined on a year round daily basis in our everyday lives. The NFL's tentacles are designed to reach us everyday.

The NBA failed because they were so intent on giving us the individual stars that after a while we knew the NBA was Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls were secondary. MLB failed because in 1981 a generation of baseball fans were first exposed to something called a strike and subsequent work stoppages have derailed that sport too often...and oh by the way their commissioner Bud Selig decided that having an exhibition game should impact the postseason. Brilliant Bud! The NHL? Was their ever a worse time to have a work stoppage for a sport after the Rangers' Stanley Cup win? The sport was significantly growing in popularity in 1994 when players and owners could not find common ground.

How does this all relate to the NFL? It's the only sport that fully understands it's the masses and not the fanatics who drive their sport to wild popularity. I've never heard the NBA, MLB, or NHL refer to their sports championship games as "national holidays". The NFL has capitalized on all of us and made their sport so relevant on a daily basis that we never miss it. Simply put, they are the machine of the American sports scene.