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CALLER: Yeah. Basically. The crystal ball thing.<\/p>\nRUSH: John in San Diego, you\u2019re next, Open Line Friday. Hello, sir.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. I have a follow-up comment on mail-in ballots, if I may. But my question is on sports talk radio and where do you see it going after the election, you know, depending on who wins the election November 3rd as far as the whole BLM, you know, kneeling for the anthem thing, as far as that goes?<\/p>\n
RUSH: So, you\u2019re asking me to forecast where I see professional sports going after the election depending on who wins?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah. Basically. The crystal ball thing.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Yeah. Okay. Pondering this. And then you said you had a follow-up on mail-in ballots and so forth. I tell you what.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yes.<\/p>\n
RUSH: I\u2019m down here to 45 seconds left in the segment. Can you hang on through the bottom-of-the-hour break?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Absolutely.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
RUSH: Okay, good. I appreciate it. ‘Cause there\u2019s no way I can answer this between now and then. I think professional sports leagues have all kinds of trouble. I think every business has gotta be open to completely redoing their business models. And I think some of them are pretty much up to speed on what they face. Others are clueless. And so much is gonna be shaken up, upside down. Market size mattering, for example. We\u2019ll talk about it when we get back here.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: Let me get back here to John in San Diego, California. A first stab at your question, let\u2019s deal with the NFL first, because I think the NBA has learned its lesson. If the National Football League doesn\u2019t realize that it\u2019s gonna have to distance itself from Black Lives Matter, if it doesn\u2019t figure that out and figure it out soon, then it\u2019s gonna be in a world of hurt. The NBA has figured it out. The NBA has said their days with being associated with Black Lives Matter are over after this season. Did you see that?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I read that they\u2019re not gonna have the logos anywhere.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Not gonna have the logos, they\u2019re not gonna have the slogans on the jerseys or on the court or any of that \u2019cause it bombed out. It bombed out. It is not why people wanted to watch. People don\u2019t want to watch sports for social justice anything. They want to watch it for all the reasons that we know. The desire on all these sports people to be relevant in terms of social justice or whatever the hell else as a marketing opportunity is something they\u2019re just misjudging like I have never seen marketing departments misjudge anything else.<\/p>\n
So the NFL is going to have to distance itself from an openly communist, Marxist organization. It is going to have to eliminate whatever official ties that it has with Black Lives Matter. If it doesn\u2019t do that, then they are going to continue to have trouble. They\u2019re also gonna have to figure out a way to get fans back in the stadium. That\u2019s gonna be largely related to public health and COVID-19, who\u2019s calling the shots on that. If Trump wins — you\u2019ve given me two options. If Trump wins, what are they gonna do? If Biden wins, what are they gonna do? Right?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah. Yeah. Either\/or. See what happens.<\/p>\n
RUSH: It\u2019s hard to say. Because there\u2019s so many variables that go into this. The NFL right now is undergoing, as are all industries, is undergoing transformation and damage that not all may be seen, may not obvious to everybody. There also may be some potential benefits or opportunities that could be presenting themselves that are gonna have to be spotted and seen for what they are as well.<\/p>\n
If Joe Biden wins, and if, as we suspect, Black Lives Matter and the radical left of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez begins to take over the country and implement the policies that they stand for, the best thing sports could do would be to back out of politics, don\u2019t have anything to do with it, just go back to the way they ran their business beforehand. Don\u2019t try to tie in with it. Because I guarantee you the vast majority of the fans in the NFL are not Marxists, they\u2019re not communists, they\u2019re not radical leftists, and they don\u2019t want the NFL or Major League Baseball or the NBA to become that.<\/p>\n
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Even if Biden wins, their best bet is to stay away from it. If Trump wins, then they had better pay attention to what that means in terms of the opinion of the electorate and who that is and what that represents. To me this isn\u2019t hard. But these guys make it hard because they get caught up in assuming, for example, like politics, that Twitter is America. And it\u2019s not. Twitter is not America.<\/p>\n
But a lot of these marketing firms at major businesses assume that it is, think they\u2019ve gotta position themselves so that they\u2019re on the right side of whatever Twitter thinks is cool and hip, and they end up doing themselves, in many cases, irreparable damage. It\u2019s not hard. The NFL just needs to go back and study what they were doing when they owned it.<\/p>\n
They were the number one sports enterprise in the history of the world. What were they doing then? Why were they? What was their focus? What kind of political involvement did they have? What kind of political attachments did they have? What did people think of them politically or not? And then be confident in the decision they make. Do you disagree with any of this? Feel free, if you do.<\/p>\n
CALLER: No. Not at all. I think basically professional sports is caught in a rock and a hard place. They\u2019re kind of like, you know, what do they do? It\u2019s like the bottom line is, you know, is the bottom line. It\u2019s money, you know. They\u2019re gonna bleed fans and viewership, they\u2019re not gonna make the money to pay the players, and they just go, you know, kaput. So it\u2019s kind of a —<\/p>\n
RUSH: That\u2019s already happening. That has to be happening now. That\u2019s the whole point. You know, some NFL teams are already laying off front office. There was some team, I can\u2019t remember the team. It might have been the Buffalo Bills. Laid off 200 people in the front office. I didn\u2019t know there were that many people in the front office. What they hell do they do?<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s coming. There\u2019s all kinds of support staff that can\u2019t be paid when you\u2019re not selling tickets. And then the broadcast rights fees are coming up for renegotiation. I don\u2019t think TV ratings are as through the roof as everybody thought they were gonna be. I think there\u2019s a lot of people scratching their heads over what\u2019s going on because a lot of people in these marketing departments still are not qualified.<\/p>\n
Or it\u2019s not that they\u2019re not qualified. They\u2019re just making errors in assessing who their audience is. It\u2019s the first thing you gotta know. When you are selling a product, selling a service, you\u2019ve got to know who your audience is, you\u2019ve got to know who your base is, you\u2019ve got to know who the potential customers are. And in professional sports, there\u2019s two groups. There\u2019s the audience that you wish you had, and then there\u2019s the audience that you do have.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
And I\u2019ll guarantee you, the NFL has a sizable audience that embarrasses it. They never admit it. They\u2019d never say so. But it\u2019s gonna take, I think, an honest assessment of why and how they achieved their prominence when they did. And if it is because a number of things they were doing appealed to traditional American values, then they gotta go back to it. And if they think traditional American values are gonna get \u2019em in trouble, if they think traditional American values are gonna get \u2019em criticized by the sports media, then they\u2019re gonna forever be in prison for it. Now, what did you want to say about mail-in ballots?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Oh, my mail-in ballot comment was, this is a dirty little secret on the mail-in ballot. Two of my friends who are Democrats, they just wanted to vote on the issues in the propositions, but they didn\u2019t vote for or against Biden. They just didn\u2019t vote on the president. You know, so I think a lot of Democrats are either gonna not vote or are gonna vote for Trump. So that might be a factor, too, because I\u2019m just one guy that knows two people that didn\u2019t vote either\/or for POTUS, and it\u2019s like okay, I\u2019m just one guy —<\/p>\n
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. They didn\u2019t vote and thought they did, or they didn\u2019t vote on purpose?<\/p>\n
CALLER: They didn\u2019t vote for either candidate because Biden and Kamala Harris are just so — you know, they said, “I can\u2019t vote for Harris,” you know, so they didn\u2019t vote for Trump or Biden.<\/p>\n
RUSH: So how does that hurt them \u2019cause you said it hurts Biden.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, a no vote for Biden is not a vote for him, so I think he loses a lot of Democrats that are assumed to have voted for Biden.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Well, yeah, but in your scenario it\u2019s not a vote for Trump, either. So people that are not voting, (raspberry) them. I mean, they\u2019re not offering anything to the equation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: I think professional sports leagues have all kinds of trouble. I think every business has gotta be open to completely redoing their business models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":367825,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n