Comment by davidd_1004

I don't really understand the "too long" complaint when NFL is the most popular sport. A baseball game is something like 30-45 minutes shorter than an NFL game. And NFL and MLB both have about 10-20 minutes of actual live play each so I don't think "nothing happens" is a particularly good explanation either.

I think the biggest reason is that it's much more difficult to follow as a casual fan due to the number of games. It was fine when baseball was more or less the only popular sport, but now it's competing with too many other things.

I hope it's true that the parity gap due to not having a salary cap is hurting the sport's popularity, but I'm not sure that's true either. The majority of fans root for only a handful of teams who benefit from not having one.