Carlin Week 10

In this week's first reading, "Black Press Coverage of the East-West Classic," Brian Carroll writes that the press' partnership with the league made the East-West Classic possible.

Carroll says in the article that as the Negro Leagues bounced back, the prospect of integrating baseball became a prominent conversation that was furthered by the African-American media. The East-West Classic became a spectacle unlike anything else, except Joe Louis fights, in African-American sports. According to Carroll, the only way it was able to generate the fortune and accumulate the fame that it did, was through the marketing and coverage of the black press. Because black newspapers had a stake in the game, Carroll writes that objective reporting largely ended as they campaigned for the classic.

In the second reading, "The relationship of fantasy football participation with NFL television ratings," John Fortunato examines how fantasy football participation relates to the number of people watching NFL games on television.

Though research on the subject is still developing, Fortunato find that there is a statistically significant correlation in both ESPN and NBC games' ratings when the games featured players that started in 90 percent of the fantasy leagues that week.

Because of the evidence Fortunato presents, he urges the NFL to take fantasy implications and the popularity of players into consideration when creating the schedule before the beginning of the season in order to drive up television ratings. He also urges the NFL to not schedule potential conflicts in cities with baseball teams and says that broadcasters could cater to fantasy football participants by providing individual statistics throughout the games.