The 49ers made it to their sixth Super Bowl this year, 18 years after their last trip to the title game. But the success of the San Francisco football team apparently hasn’t fired up the San Francisco fan base.
Ann Killion of the San Francisco Chronicle explained earlier this week that the Giants seem to be the favorite sports team in the Bay Area.
She points to the fact that, during Super Bowl XLVII, Baltimore was the top market in the country under the Nielsen ratings -- and San Francisco was 28th, behind the likes of Dayton, Milwaukee, and Jacksonville.
That wasn’t the case during the World Series, when San Francisco and Detroit were the top markets watching the Giants and Tigers, respectively. And so, as Killion describes it, there’s a “different vibe with the 49ers than there once was,” with a lower level of passion than the Giants generate.
The 49ers have the talent and the potential to rekindle flame. Still, the current version of the team already can never fully compare to its predecessors, since the new Niners have lost the first Super Bowl in team history.