Sports fans would watch sailing

With the suspended or cancelled sports seasons, fans and media companies alike are desperate for content. ESPN is featuring tournaments of professional athletes playing video games with each other and basketballers playing remote games of horse.

Classic games and championship series are being re-aired on sports radio stations and networks around the country. The distress is getting intense, and, according to one study, some Americans are almost ready to settle for sailing.

Sports Illustrated surveyed its online users to gauge where the level of desperation is during this crisis. According to the results, 58% of American sports fans were “almost willing” to watch an entire sailing race if it were new content. This is a huge spike from the .7% that Sports Illustrated reported in a similar survey last year.

“You can only watch reruns and old highlights so much,” said one fan. “I need to see new games. I’m seriously close to being able to watch guys sail around a course for an hour and a half to win a race. It’s that bad.”

While interest in the sport scored higher than ever, a slightly higher percentage of fans said they’d be more entertained by watching the tide rise on the race course than actually watching a race.

Editor’s note: Full disclosure… we changed the sport in this story from soccer to sailing but we still see an opportunity if it wasn’t for championship regattas being cancelled.