I hate all of the gambling adds, but I will say, fantasy football drives viewership of random games. I never watched NFL games until I started playing fantasy with my friends. The structure of games once a week works really well to make that all work. The NHL has too many games of insignificant meaning to make watching random games to see how my players are doing something viable. I have 2 fantasy hockey teams and I just basically watch the stats because if they don't do much on Tuesday, they'll probably do something on Thursday.
Long story short, I think a lot of casual viewing of NFL is driven by gambling and fantasy football and the structure of an 82 game season isn't really conducive to that.
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