Sports Illustrated Covers Trending Towards Blacks And Football

Dolores Labs Blog has taken an interesting look at the Sports Illustrated covers for the past 50 some years and found that the covers are trending more towards football player covers and black athletes covers.

Leaving the race on covers issue aside for now, I find it most interesting that basketball overtook football in the spotlight for over a decade and baseball has actually remained pretty constant despite all of its troubles...maybe that makes for good press. The race issue is certainly more of a factor of the rising amounts of black athletes in "major" sports compared to the declining amounts of white athletes in the same sports. The sports covered however is an interesting indication of the increasing and decreasing popularity of the sports as a whole.

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't mean all that much, but it is always neat to look at the trends in the coverage of sports from the publishing world.

Images & Data from Dolores Labs Blog