Four NFL Conference Contenders. Four Cities That Show & Grow
Silicon Valley and a mega-stadium in LA, while the AFC matchup pairs midsized metro teams that capture the resilience of flyover country. Some non-gridiron numbers!
There is much to observe about the four teams playing for the championship of their respective conferences. The Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers play for the National Football Conference (NFC) title; the Cincinnati Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs play for the American Football Conference (AFC) title. A trip to the Super Bowl awaits two of these teams.
From regional population trends to stadiums to team history, these four places represent a window on the pulse of the American nation in 2022 as the union buckles slightly under the stress of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally, these four remaining NFL teams highlight larger population trends in today’s America. Los Angeles, like California itself, grew over the past decade but not as fast as Texas, Nevada or Tennessee. The Golden State became older, too. Census figures in 2018 indicate older adults over 65 are projected to outnumber kids for the first time in U.S. history by 2035. Nearly one in four Americans identify as either Hispanic or Asian.
Many (but not all) regional mid-sized metro areas across the country continue to attract decent numbers of new residents. Kansas City, Missouri reached a new population high mark in 2020 while Memphis, Tennessee lost 14,000 people over the past decade. Despite rental and home prices that are some of the highest in the nation, the sprawling nine-county San Francisco Bay region grew by 615,000 people over the past decade. Pandemic or not, coastal cities are still drawing people.
There are no New England Patriots or New York Giants or Dallas Cowboys in the conference finals this year. But perhaps these four teams in 2022, two from the center of the American Midwest and two from the West Coast, represent a preordained demographic compromise made in some marketing heaven.
Fun fact: the mean center of population in the United States of America is currently Wright County in south central Missouri.
Must See TV, Again
The 2021 Super Bowl (LV) attracted 96.4 million viewers for CBS, the smallest television audience for a Super Bowl since 2007. But the 2022 NFL playoff schedule has delivered impressive ratings.
The January 23 AFC matchup between the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs was the most watched NFL divisional playoff game in five years — 43 million viewers. The January 22 NFC division playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and the 49ers drew 37 million viewers, a 40% viewership increase over the same 2021 match according to viewership data.
All four teams have arrived at this point through impressive and dramatic division-round playoff victories. A lot of football fans, casual and diehard, are showing interest. So, here are some numbers and facts to ponder this weekend.
No Place Like Home
One fascinating aspect to explore is the respective stadium of the teams — why and where these teams play where they do. There’s no place like a home with sky boxes, light rail stations and video replay in 4K. The NFC title game takes place in LA (SoFi Stadium) and the AFC game in Kansas City (Arrowhead Stadium).
The new home of the LA Rams, SoFi Stadium, is located in suburban Inglewood and takes first place in terms of stadium cost and ambition. The 70,000-seat stadium cost about $5 billion and is part of a larger ongoing residential-commercial-hotel-entertainment development project. The project is the ultimate marriage of Southern California dreaming, mixed-use urban development and NFL moxie. The Rams returned to Los Angeles from St. Louis, Missouri in 2016 where they played in two previous Super Bowls. They’re back home, again.
Fun fact: The city of Los Angeles has about 3.9 million residents, still #2 nationally to New York City’s 8.8 million. But Los Angeles County, with 10 million residents, is the most populous county in the nation.
It’s been so long that many non-Midwest/Southern Plains football fans may have forgotten that the Chiefs franchise originally began as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League before relocating to Kansas City in 1963. Fifty years separate the Chief’s first (1970) and last Super Bowl championship in 2020 (the 2019 season).
For Kansas City, Arrowhead Stadium (the official name is now GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium) is part of a single sports complex that includes Kauffman Stadium, home of the professional Kansas City Royals baseball team. They represent an urban planning design aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s when numerous professional sports stadiums (sometimes in pairs) in growing metro areas were surrounded by highways, interchanges and an asphalt sea of parking spaces for cars, lots of cars.
The Kansas City-Overland Park metro area has a population of about 2.2 million. The city itself has 508,000 residents, two-hundred thousand more people than the city of St. Louis on the opposite side of the Show-Me State. Between 2010 and 2020, St. Louis actually lost 18,000 residents while Kansas City’s population is now the largest in the city’s history. Medium-size Midwest metro areas like KC are attracting people. Believe it.
Fun fact: Arrowhead Stadium opened in August 1972, the same month that the Summer Olympics began in Munich, West Germany.
The San Francisco 49ers actually play about 40 miles south of the city at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara (Santa Clara County). The previous home of the 49ers, Candlestick Park, located within the city, opened back in 1960 and cost just $15 million to build. The tech boom and population trends necessitated a new venue for the team. The process of moving the team south to Santa Clara (while keeping the San Francisco name) was very contentious in 2006. But as noted previously, the entire Bay region, north and south, is growing — and growing at an impressive clip.
The Silicon Valley region of San Jose-Sunnyvale-Mountain View-Palo Alto is home to technology and money — lots of both. Oh, and the actual hometown fans farther up the peninsula? The San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area boasts a population of 4.7 million and provides a sizable fanbase who can venture down the peninsula by car or CalTrain.
Fun fact: California indeed lost a House seat for the first time in the 2020 census. But the Golden State still added more than two and a quarter million residents in the last decade.
The Cincinnati (Cincy-Wilmington-Maysville) metro area is nearly identical in population to the Kansas City metro: 2.2 million. The Queen City (its nickname) was once a more prominent location in national affairs and economic influence. Thanks to its placement at the confluence of the Licking and Ohio Rivers, the city prospered in the years leading up to the Civil War due in part to river commerce with St. Louis and New Orleans. By the 1860 census, Cincinnati was the sixth most populous city in America (161,000), just behind Boston.
The Bengals are making their first conference championship game appearance since 1988. They’re the only one of the four remaining teams who play in what could be considered a classic downtown stadium — Paul Brown Stadium.
The 2020 census delivered some very good news to the Queen City. Cincinnati’s population grew by 4.2% over the past decade. The city now has about 309,000 residents, the first increase in population there since 1950. The Midwest endures.
Super Bowl LVI takes place on Sunday, February 13 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
Only once before in NFL history has a Super Bowl game taken place in the home stadium of one of the two participating teams — Tampa Bay, 2021. The LA Rams would like to become the second team to perform that feat.
On-field excitement and drama have created some genuine widespread buzz for the NFL this frigid January. The pandemic, too, perhaps has left many Americans looking for someone to root for during the dead of winter. Perhaps, too, the four individual teams offer something unique this year. Big city coastal glam and mid-size Midwest modesty.
These four cities, like others across America — big, medium and small — endure.
