Mark Woods: We're No. 41? Ranking of 'best sports cities' has Jacksonville last in NFL

When it comes to being a great sports city, we’re Number … 41?

Or so said a recent study done by WalletHub. The Miami-based personal finance company came up with a ranking of America’s “Best Sports Cities” in 2023 — saying it’s from the fans’ perspective, based on 50 metrics related to football, basketball, baseball, soccer and hockey.

It’s easy to question the results of the study. I mean, it finds Los Angeles to be the best sports city in America. If a city goes two decades without an NFL team and it barely notices, can it be America's best sports city? I’m not even sure Jack Nicholson would try to argue this from his courtside Lakers seat.

After Los Angeles, the rest of the top 10 are Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., San Francisco and Cincinnati.

The study puts a premium on having a lot of teams in your city and on one of them being a football team. But you have to go past plenty of cities that don’t have an NFL team — Clemson, Tuscaloosa, Salt Lake City, San Diego, West Point, Fayette, Portland, Columbus and Orlando — before you get to Jacksonville at No. 41, behind every other NFL market.

I bring this up now, because for the second time this month, Jacksonville will be on primetime television and at the epicenter of the American sports world. The Jaguars play the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL’s Sunday Night Football game, just 13 days after hosting a Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Other than the Super Bowl week in 2005, this likely is the most eyes the city has had on it. Sunday night’s game on NBC will have substantially larger TV ratings than Florida-Georgia games, big matchups for bowl games, or Tiger Woods chasing a title in The Players Championship.

There will be television shots of downtown, of the river and bridges. (Hopefully not images that are laughably old, as evidenced by shots of the the Landing.) And if the past is any indication, there will be some shots fired by out-of-town sportswriters and talk radio hosts, saying Jacksonville is a lousy sports town — even if this is another game with EverBank packed to capacity.

I’ll defend the Jaguars fans who have stuck with the team through thin and thinner, and now are finally able to go to primetime December games with playoff spots on the line. (I’ll also defend someone’s decision not to spend their money on tickets for this game, or any other one. I don’t buy the idea that it’s some sort of civic duty.)

There are a few places that will keep filling a stadium or arena no matter how long a team is bad. But that’s the exception. And sometimes winning doesn’t do it. Even in some of the “best sports cities.”

I once covered an NFL game in Los Angeles, before the Raiders moved back to Oakland. It was mid-December. The weather was nice. Maybe too nice? Because even though the Raiders were headed to the playoffs, the 77,000-seat Coliseum had an official attendance of 40,532.

The Raiders said they needed a new stadium. They now have one. In Vegas. And now the Chargers and Rams, two teams transplanted after their cities supposedly weren’t supportive enough, play in a $5 billion stadium in Los Angeles.

Baltimore and the 'Colts Quiz'

The visitors for the Sunday night game come from Baltimore — a city with a rich history and, according to the WalletHub study, currently the 25th best sports city in America.

I don’t know where Baltimore deserves to rank on that list. I will say it has one of the great sports scenes in a movie. Not set on a field or court, but in a Baltimore basement in 1959.

In “Diner,” Eddie insists that his fiancee pass an impossibly difficult Colts trivia test before he’ll agree to marry her. Elyse fails the Colts Quiz by two points. Eddie decides to overlook the score and walk down the aisle — although the aisle is conspicuously lined with the Colts colors.

That movie came out in 1982, two years before the Colts loaded up a Mayflower van and left in the middle of the night.

Should being a 'good sports town' be a priority?

There are a couple of basic, yet complicated questions here: What makes a good sports town? Beyond that, should a city even make being one a priority?

This is where I easily could say, never mind being a good sports town, I want a great city, one that’s known as a good education town, a good arts town, a good parks town, a good public safety town, a good walking town, a good food town, a good health care town, a good family town, a good employment town, a good charitable town, a good historic town … and so on.

There are many things more important than being a good sports town, right? I do believe that. But I also know it’s a bit hypocritical to say that it doesn't matter, because I’ve spent way too many hours in my life talking with friends and strangers about good sports towns and bad sports towns.

Even that’s a matter of opinion, not easily quantified by metrics. One friend believes Philly is a great sports town. Another argues that pelting Santa with snowballs shouldn’t be viewed as a positive. There’s a fine line between die-hard fan, fanatic, and an Alabama fan poisoning Auburn’s trees.

At the core of these debates always is the assumption that being a good sports town is a good thing, and being a bad sports town is a bad thing. Maybe it’s not that simple. Or certainly not as simple as having a packed football stadium.

The city where I had my first newspaper job — Valparaiso, Indiana — is ranked 250th. This clearly doesn’t take into account what are the biggest community events in Valpo: high school basketball games.

There are some places at the bottom of the WalletHub rankings of great sports cities that seem like they’d be great places to live: Bozeman, Montana (209th), Flagstaff, Arizona (237), Asheville, North Carolina (274), Santa Barbara, California (284).

And then there’s a town near where I grew up: No. 319 Appleton, Wisconsin.

Appleton is about 30 miles south of Green Bay (No. 19 and No. 1 for midsize cities). It’s so close that visiting NFL teams sometimes stay there the night before a game. But that’s not why Sports Illustrated devoted most of an issue to Appleton in 1986. A headline on the cover said, “America at play.” And inside it said, “Hooray, Appleton, USA! … A place where people take their games seriously — but not too seriously. This 33-page look at sporting Appleton provides a window on the world of sport in towns all over America.”

Sporting Appleton, it said, represented an essence of sports “that has little to do with the big-time, big-dollar variety that dominates the headlines.”

Or, one could add, rankings of great sports cities.

I do want Jacksonville to be a good sports town. But not simply in the stereotypical way.

I want Jacksonville be a city with an NFL team that packs its stadium (and, yes, the cost of that stadium is another topic worth debating). But I also want it to be one that supports and leans into all the ways to play here, everything from the Gate River Run to the Kingfish Tournament, the Sporting Jacksonville that includes the city’s newly named professional soccer club but goes well beyond that.

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville ranked No. 41 in list of 2023 'best sports cities'