The Post continues to roll out its polling of area sports fans with a story about black Redskins fans. Apparently, black people have gotten over the whole years-of-segregation thing in order to cheer for the only local football team. In fact, black fans have a far more favorable view of the team than white fans do.
The story is part of a larger package built around a poll with a couple dozen questions about how area residents enjoy sports. Questions include things like what respondents’ favorite teams are, how they follow their teams, and whether they bought team gear.
The conclusions weren’t particularly surprising: D.C. is sort of lukewarm on sports. But the Post uses a heck of a lot of words to say that.
The survey was taken July 29-Aug. 29, which seems like a particularly long time to run a survey, but according to Post sports editor Matt Vita, “The poll was conducted by the Post’s in-house polling department. I’m not a polling expert, but the method they used—-they call it Addressed Based Sampling——allowed for multiple mailings and calling times. As I understand it, this method just takes longer to complete.”
And even though the poll was taken when some of the country’s biggest sports—-hockey, football, and basketball—-were not in season, Vita says, “We asked questions about people’s general interest levels, which don’t tend to vary a lot by season.”
Considering the paper already rolled out some of the poll questions a month ago, it’s not entirely clear why it merited enormous real estate in the paper this week. But there was one tidbit that made the whole thing worth waiting for, in Sunday’s spread. News luminary Luke Russert—-son of the late Tim Russert, a Buffalo Bills fan—-had this to say on the subject:
“Where do people find that inspiration, where do people find that yearning to believe in something bigger than themselves? In Buffalo, it’s the sport teams…Whereas in D.C., yeah, we root for our teams, but we’re much more defined by the brainpower in our city, the politics, the gentrification, the think tanks, the programs. In a town that has so much opportunity, the sports kind of get marginalized.”
Aha! It’s the gentrification!
Photo by the malones via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License