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Yeah, I think you're mostly right, I don't think it resulted in any particularly massive shift, I think maybe it explains why some sort fandoms are stickier than others, maybe?
I grew up on the normal American big 3 sports, football, baseball, basketball, I still follow the results of each (I go on the internet and look up who won, generally have a sense of who the stat leaders are, etc), in terms of actually watching full games, I rarely ever watch a baseball game anymore (sometimes I flip over to the 8th or 9th innings of playoff games), I occasionally watch a basketball game, more frequently I flip over the last 3 or 4 minutes of the game, and will watch if it's still close, I regularly watch full football games.
(Obviously sample size of 1 doesn't say much about anything, but from my perspective, football watching has seemed more sticky in a marketing sense than the other sports, idk).
I think Football is more of a social event than the other sports for most people, and as social connections have gotten more attenuated and the list of acceptable small-talk topics has shrunk, the NFL has taken on a greater meaning for a lot of people. It's doing work that casual discussions about things that didn't used to be risky or politically charged used to carry the burden for. Being Birds fan is a bigger part of my personality now than it was in college, because "Go Birds" is an easy way to chat with a wide variety of people in my life now. I can talk with my wife's ob-gyn and with my roofer about the AJ Brown trade quite easily.
One more thing about the phones (and the social nature of it), the pace of it is such that group chats can happen concurrently with the game. I'm in a group chat that starts pinging every time the Steelers play. It's easier to check a group chat(and contribute to it) during a football game and not miss important action than it is a soccer game.
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