For most of us this week winter has finally come. It seemed the perfect weekend for our first arctic plunge as it was Wild Card Weekend in the National Football League, and I could hunker down with three days of football.

As a Kansas City Chiefs fan, I was excited to watch them take on the Miami Dolphins and hoped the Chiefs’ receivers could catch the ball in the cold. Yet, to my surprise and frustration while watching the Cleveland Browns-Houston Texans game, I saw an advertisement for the next game, only streaming on Peacock. I don’t have Peacock. I thought about subscribing for just this game, but I already have more streaming services than I need, and I refuse to be forced to subscribe to yet another. The advertisements for Peacock all said the same thing: It’s the first time a playoff game will be streamed and so sign up and be part of history. Streaming a playoff game is historic, but the NFL should note it’s probably not the history they are hoping for.

Today in sports there are the big four that dominate: baseball, basketball, hockey and the biggest of all, football.

Yet, if we traveled back 100 years, the sports scene was much different with the big three being horse racing, boxing and the one constant baseball. In the 1920s and ‘30s everyone had their favorite horse, and the most significant sports star was the heavyweight boxing champ. Every kid dreamed of being the heavyweight champion and the sporting events were the biggest thing on the radio. This changed over time and for many reasons.

While baseball still has a considerable following it has fallen behind basketball and football in popularity. Most consider this due to TV. Baseball is perfect for radio but is thought of as too slow to keep modern audiences glued to a TV the way the fast-paced sports like football do.

For horse racing, most historians see four major causes. First, horse racing used to be the only legal form of gambling, but then the rise of casinos captured the attention of gamblers.

Secondly, the move to the suburbs in the 1950s took people away from the tracks mostly built in urban areas. Thirdly, horses did not race as much. If a horse won a leg of the Triple Crown, they were sent to stud. It’s hard to develop relationships with favorite horses if they only raced a couple times. Finally, animal rights groups protested the sport as cruel to animals, turning off some fans.

Let’s focus on boxing. Heavyweight champions were worshiped 100 years ago. Yet, today even as a big sports fan, I have no idea who the champ is. That is a big change. In the 1920s and ’30s names like Jack Dempsey, Tommy Loughran, Joe Louis and of course Jim Braddock were spoken in reverence. Boxing, unlike horse racing, survived the post-war years and it thrived with TV. Boxing fit TV perfectly. Boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano kept the sport thriving.

In the 1960s the sport actually grew when a young Cassius Clay captured America’s attention. Changing his name to Muhammad Ali, he became to many, the greatest boxer of all time. It was not just Ali, the next two decades also had fighters like Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman to keep fans interested.

While it would take time for boxing popularity to fall, something happened in the 1970s that is at least partly responsible, a cable network HBO. In 1973 Home Box Office premiered its World Boxing Championship series with an amazing match between Foreman and Frazier. While the fight pitted two superstars, it also limited its audience as less than 10% of Americans had cable.

HBO topped itself in 1975 when it broadcasted ‘The Thrilla in Manila’ between Ali and Frazier on a payper- view format. The fight was huge, and the format did not seem to hurt the sport’s popularity. Yet as boxing began to be dominated by HBO, it started to lose the casual fan as many households did not have the service.

Things looked up for subscription services in the 1980s. About 60% of homes had cable by the end of the decade and at least half of them had HBO, but that is still only 30% of the television audience. Luckily boxing still thrived, especially with new superstars like Mike Tyson. Too young to have watched Ali live, for me Tyson was the greatest boxer I had ever seen. I loved his fights, but it required a bunch of us kids to pool our money to afford to watch them.

The problem for Tyson fights on pay-perview was that after shelling out all the cash he knocked out his opponent in the first round. Tyson beat Bruce Seldon in a championship fight in one minute forty-nine seconds. I don’t recall how much we paid to see the fight, but it was a lot of money to shell out for less than two minutes.

Mixed Martial Arts has stolen many fans who prefer what is often seen as a much more violent sport. I’d contend that boxing has lost popularity partly because of the added expense of subscribing to premium channels.

While boxing remains big and the major fights still draw big crowds, its place in the American landscape is only a shadow of its past. There is no longer the casual fan and today young boys dream of being the next Lebron James or Patrick Mahomes.

I have no idea what the ratings were for the Chiefs game. They were probably spiked with the thousands of Swifties who tuned in to see how many cutaways there were of Taylor Swift. No matter the ratings, they could not have been as large as other games that were broadcast on regular networks.

I am not saying football might go the way of boxing. Most of the games were on the networks and most Americans now stream their content. Also, unlike boxing, the NFL does not need to worry about the Chiefs knocking out the Dolphins in two minutes, even though it did look that way with the Green Bay Packers v. Dallas Cowboys.

It’s just difficult to understand when you are the king, why tinker with the product? Maybe viewer accessibility is what keeps them on top. Yet if you want to call a streaming game “historic”, historically speaking there was a time when boxing was king.

James Finck is a professor of history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He may be reached at HistoricallySpeaking1776@ gmail.com.