NFL facing an unexpected plummet in TV ratings
The NFL has a problem it has not had in quite some time, if ever. Television ratings have plummeted. The league that has experienced nothing but success and growth for decades suddenly and unexpectedly is losing viewers.
The reasons are twofold: Greed and stupidity. We will get to those in a bit, but first the stark reality of the numbers one-fourth of the way into the season.
The national game on Fox last week was down 13 percent from a year ago. While regional coverage on CBS was off only 2 percent, the early game on Fox dropped 14 percent and the morning game from London was down a whopping 25 percent.
Even the Steelers, almost always a ratings winner, could not deliver for Sunday night football. That game was a disaster for TV with a 31 percent crash in viewers over the same time as last year.
Thursday night games are down 11 percent, Monday night 27 percent.
NBC still won Sunday night over everything else with the Steelers rout of Kansas City, but the networks are not paying their billions to merely win. They need to crush the competition.
The league will blame it on competition from the Presidential debate opposite Monday Night Football or the JonBenet redux or the season debut of “Madam Secretary” or whatever else they can find.
Those are excuses. Now for those real reasons: greed and stupidity.
-Fantasy Football. The NFL picked up the ball on this hobby and ran with it big time and now it’s helping to kill the game. Fantasy players are not interested in watching a three-hour football game between two teams. They want to know how their team is doing, and you do not get that watching one football game. While the NFL and its teams, including the Steelers, promote and gladly rake in money from gambling sites such as DraftKings, the viewership of their game product has plummeted as fantasy players take their eyeballs to media websites that deliver the goods that only interest them.
-The Red Zone channel. The league gleefully promoted this through their NFL Network, which cuts in and out of all Sunday afternoon games when teams approach the scoring area or “red zone.” There are no commercials and, therefore, brings in money only from the Dish Network, where it is shown and also on Verizon smartphones.
Who had this bright idea? It’s paradise for short attention spans but saps viewership from real games elsewhere.
-Penalty flags. Nothing kills the flow of a game like a penalty, which often is followed by a group discussion among the officials. Penalties are necessary evils, but not at this rate. A record was set last season for the first three games when 730 penalties were called. That overall pace has not continued but taunting penalties are up 220 percent over the first four weeks of last season, according to ESPN. Unsportsmanlike conduct penalties are up 55.6 percent.
Roger Goodell proposed the new rule, adopted this season, that two unsportsmanlike penalties by one player in a game will automatically get him ejected. In other words, if Antonio Brown celebrated both of his touchdowns in the first quarter the way he did one of them, he would have been tossed for the rest of the game. And that abysmal Sunday night football rating would have been worse.
-Protesting the national anthem. Whether you agree with the protest or just do not care, many Americans apparently are turned off with the trend that Colin Kaepernick inspired. Sporting News cited a survey of 1,000 adults in which 32 percent said they’re less likely to watch an NFL game on television because of the various protests – kneeling, fists raised, etc. – during the playing of the National Anthem (13 percent said they were more likely to watch because of it). This, even though the networks rarely televise the national anthem.
-Diminished kickoff returns. The NFL virtually eliminated kickoff returns when it moved the kickoff to the 35. Now, most are kicked into or out of the end zone for a touchback. The league then reduced the chance that a return man might be tempted to run it out by giving the receiving team the bonus of placing the touchback at the 25 instead of the 20. The rule was passed in the name of safety, so why don’t they just eliminate the time wasted on the kickoff and go with a jump ball or something to start the game?
-Instant replay. That is a conflict in terms because when it is used to check an official’s decision, it is anything but instant. It disrupts the flow of a game, the fans’ reactions to touchdowns and turnovers and adds more time to games unnecessarily. This is all in the name of “getting it right” even though replay often does not and even on occasion gets it wrong. Somehow the game survived and thrived without using replay to “get it right.”
-Product saturation. There are too many games: Sunday morning, early Sunday afternoon, late Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night. Whew. I’m worn out just writing that. Who has all that time, or wants to use it watching that much football? The numbers say fewer and fewer of you.
-The safety issue. While the NFL virtually had to do something to reduce the chance of concussions, big hits were popular. The league and its network partners promoted them before it became politically incorrect to do so. They have succeeded in reducing those hits but I suspect they also lost some viewers because of it.
Whatever the reasons, TV viewership of NFL games is off considerably. Maybe it was inevitable since football grew in such great popularity year after year. But if that trend continues, the league will have more headaches than those it has gotten from the concussion quagmire.