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Thx -X-, I watched that vid over and over and over and over.........................:headexplosion:
Why is TV viewership for NFL games down?
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Mikey Ram
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Shot on me again...I have to stream the game because it's only on the NFL network ??? My cable bill is already over $ 130...Can't/ won't add apremium channel that I seldom have much interest in...Can't get Direct TV because tree are in direct line that blocks access to the satellite signal...I hate the fucking NFL hierarchy z!!!
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I'm hearing that the number one reason is people are pissed at the players protesting/kneeling/raising fists, during the National Anthem.
Was just now on a survey that was mentioned. I'll try and get more information.
Edit:
Yep.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeoza...use-of-national-anthem-protests/#65672aa774b7
Confirmed: NFL Losing Millions Of TV Viewers Because Of National Anthem Protests
Mike Ozanian ,
Forbes Staff
Traffic cop at the intersection of money and sports
JACKSONVILLE, FL – SEPTEMBER 25: Hayes Pullard #52 of the Jacksonville aJaguars nd Dante Fowler #56 raise their fists in protest during the singing of the national anthem before the game against the Baltimore Ravens (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
A headline for a story in the Sporting News this morning: “Shock poll: A third of NFL TV viewers boycotting games because of Colin Kaepernick-led protests.”
Shock? Why?
The Sporting News article says “Nearly one-third (32 percent) of adults say they’re less likely to watch NFL game telecasts because of the Kaepernick-led player protests against racial injustice, according to Rasmussen’s telephone/online survey of 1,000 American adults conducted Oct. 2-3. Only 13 percent said they were more likely to watch an NFL game because of continuing protests by Kaepernick and supporters such as Antonio Cromartie of the Colts (who was cut only two days after raising a fist during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in London on Sunday).”
Also on Forbes:
This was very predictable.
Three weeks ago I wrote that “the national anthem protests that began with San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick and has since been copied by other players have angered many fans. And that anger may be one reason why the television ratings for the first week of NFL games were bad.” As my colleague, Brandon Katz wrote: “Both CBS’ Sunday afternoon game and NBC’s Sunday Night Football saw their lowest ratings in seven years. Throw in last night’s lackluster debut and the 2016 NFL season is off to its slowest start in recent memory in terms of TV ratings.”
Two weeks ago I wrote ”it is starting to look like disrespecting the country during the national anthem is accomplishing what the concussions, domestic violence and deflategate could not do–drive down television ratings for the National Football League. Through two weeks of football the NFL’s television ratings are down across the board. The drop in ratings and viewership is unprecedented in recent years and has occurred during the protest of the national anthem, started by San Francisco 49ers backup QB Colin Kaepernick. Just last year some opined that the league’s ratings had no ceiling. That appears to be false.”
Last edited:
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Here's a headline worthy of the increasingly nonsensical Roger Goodell. So he only counts the viewers if they turn on a game, but it doesn't matter if they shut if off after 5 minutes?
********************************************************************************
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...ot-losing-viewers-but-some-are-watching-less/
Roger Goodell: NFL not losing viewers, but some are watching less
Posted by Michael David Smith on October 19, 2016
The NFL’s television ratings decline this season is not a result of fewer fans watching, but rather of fans who are watching football watching less of it than they used to.
That’s the word from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who says that the league still has as many fans as ever, it’s just that some of them are turning games off earlier.
“We don’t think we’ve lost viewers, and I think when you look at ratings you have to go a little deeper than that,” Goodell said. “There’s viewers, but also how long they’re engaging for. A lot of times, people will leave a game for whatever reason, whether they’re going to go to other programming, or whether the game is less competitive. Those are all factors. As an example, on the competitive, while we’ve had very close games overall, league-wide, we haven’t had the closest games in prime time. Last year we did, and in 2014 we did, and ratings reflected that the first five weeks at record levels.”
Asked if some people are turning off the NFL because Colin Kaepernick and others are protesting during the national anthem, Goodell dismissed that idea.
“We don’t think that’s a factor and our network partners don’t either,” Goodell said.
Whatever the reasons for fans watching less football, Goodell acknowledged that it’s an issue the league needs to look at. Even as he doesn’t believe fans are turned off by the game as a whole.
Billy Baroo
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Ironically enough, NFL Red Zone Channel is a big contributing factor.
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http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/10/...ersaturation-at-root-of-nfls-ratings-decline/
Arrogance, Deceit, Oversaturation At Root Of NFL’s Ratings Decline
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) — Ratings are down in the NFL, and everybody’s got their theories as to what is the root cause. Some are more valid than others.
But the problem in trying to diagnose the issue is that there is no one answer. No singular catastrophe can be pinpointed as the ground zero for the ratings decline, as it’s more of a blend of multiple factors that really has gone against the NFL through these first two months of the season.
Here is my brief summation.
Over-Saturation
This was inevitable. It had to happen. A sports league can only dominate the ratings so much before it eventually comes down. The gains had to stop at some point.
Arrogance
In some ways, the NFL can’t be faulted for believing it could schedule literally any of the 32 NFL teams for any prime-time matchup and still draw massive ratings. The people at the NFL believed this because we essentially told them it was true.
Even a Jags-Titans game in recent years would draw huge ratings, which probably led to some laziness when figuring out that daunting prime-time schedule. This will likely be adjusted next year following this year’s wake-up call.
Thursday Night Football
It’s not good football. If it were good football, the league wouldn’t need to concoct some phony “color rush” gimmick to try to get people to watch. Players are not recovered from Sunday’s bruises. Game plans are simplified.
And because every team must play a Thursday game, the matchups often stink. The average margin of victory in Thursday night games this season is 14.4 points. It is — largely — unwatchable.
Deception
While very few people might actually turn off their TVs as a form of protest over DeflateGate or Bountygate or the failures of Roger Goodell and the league office in properly addressing players who commit acts of domestic violence, there is no doubt a mental toll that is taken from so much nonsense constantly surrounding the league.
It might only be a small number, but there must be people who (in the middle of a dreadful 49ers-Bills game) start to question why they’re wasting their time watching this league. Team owners can thank Roger Goodell, largely, for the air of deceit that emanates from the league.
Denial
Roger Goodell telling the world on Wednesday that the NFL stands firmly against sports gambling really says everything that needs to be said about the way the NFL operates. The league treats its viewers and consumers as if they’re idiots. It’s a continuation of the way the league ignored concussions for years.
Now, player safety is a priority, yet known dirty players get away with dirty play, Cam Newton gets his face bashed in on national TV, and players around the league still drop like flies every week, and nobody from the league says boo. They think you’re dumb. You’re finally starting to prove them wrong.
Everybody Stinks
This problem has been apparent to some of us for a few years, but the issue is that despite the league’s insistence that parity exists, very few teams are actually Super Bowl contenders. It’s the same teams in the mix every year.
It’s a Haves/Have Nots league, and the bad teams are bad. Meanwhile in a related story, this week the 1-5 Chicago Bears will play their third prime-time game in a six-week span.
Peyton Manning Is Gone
People liked to watch this guy play football. I haven’t heard his name mentioned much when folks discuss the drop in ratings, but his absence definitely plays a significant role. Networks used to fight every November to get the big Tom Brady-Peyton Manning showdown on their air.
Even last year, when he threw with his right arm the same way most NFL quarterbacks would throw with their left arms, people had to tune in. His games had a special feeling about them. Now? Trevor Siemian throwing 5-yard outs in the final minutes of a game while his Broncos trail by two scores is not exactly captivating television.
Tom Brady Was Suspended
TV networks know that in order to sell games to viewers, you need stars. One inhibitor to that goal is when the league spends $10 million and two years trying to paint their biggest star as some sort of criminal over something that never mattered before in the history of sports.
Whoops. Fact is, more people seem to hate Tom Brady than love him, but they all can’t help but tune in when he’s on their television screens. At least the country was treated to that rousing Jacoby Brissett vs. Houston Texans experience.
(My gif comment on this. Notice the location of this writer)
London
The NFL felt that it had perfected its product in the United States so much that it went ahead and started making international plans in England, China and Mexico. It’s necessary only from the perspective of a corporation in a capitalistic society that must always find a way to increase profits, no matter how high those profits might already be.
But from a football perspective, it’s completely unnecessary. And it makes little sense to force this complicated, clunky sport onto cultures that don’t care much to embrace it. Yet, the NFL persists and seems intent on setting a team in London permanently.
Personality Suppression
The league has a bad reputation for being a corporation that would prefer its “stars” to be nameless, faceless, and above all, replaceable. Throwing 15-yard penalties for the most harmless of celebrations doesn’t do anything to dispel that perception.
Officials Dictate Too Much
In the very first game of the NFL season, the Carolina Panthers trailed the Denver Broncos by one point in the final minutes. Carolina faced a fourth-and-21. The odds were long, and when Cam Newton threw incomplete, the game was lost. But wait! A flag. A penalty on Chris Harris for giving a shove to a wide receiver resulted in a five-yard penalty and, more importantly, an automatic first down.
That is preposterous and it goes against the entire premise of what football is all about. There’s a reason that many sports fans have lost respect and appreciation of the NBA, and it has a lot to do with touch fouls. The NFL at times treats such fouls even softer than the NBA, which should never be the case.
To be sure, there are some other reasons. The car-crash element of the presidential election has certainly stolen some viewers from various games, and there’s no doubt a fringe collection of outspoken flag protectors who are so appalled by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest that they’ve stopped watching football altogether (even though national anthems are almost never aired on Sunday afternoon games).
But add it all up, and it’s simply been difficult for the average NFL fan to get excited about watching 10 hours of football every Sunday. The league is just having trouble filling up its 15-to-18-hour window every week with captivating programming. Any league would; it’s just a new problem for the NFL.
Realistically, ratings will likely fluctuate a bit going forward this season, with some weeks seeing an increase and others seeing a drop. The NFL is not a sinking ship, and the folks in charge are not running around the deck with buckets of water to try to bail it out. It’s merely taking a hit right now, but the fact is that the multi-billion dollar monolith can withstand it.
What this year’s ratings will do is provide a wake-up call to the NFL that the league is going to need to try harder. The days of blindly putting two teams down on a schedule and setting ratings records are over. But that will, presumably, result in the NFL’s leaders strategizing a plan this coming offseason to map out a better plan of how to maximize viewership and, thus, advertising and TV revenue going forward.
Arrogance, Deceit, Oversaturation At Root Of NFL’s Ratings Decline
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) — Ratings are down in the NFL, and everybody’s got their theories as to what is the root cause. Some are more valid than others.
But the problem in trying to diagnose the issue is that there is no one answer. No singular catastrophe can be pinpointed as the ground zero for the ratings decline, as it’s more of a blend of multiple factors that really has gone against the NFL through these first two months of the season.
Here is my brief summation.
Over-Saturation
This was inevitable. It had to happen. A sports league can only dominate the ratings so much before it eventually comes down. The gains had to stop at some point.
Arrogance
In some ways, the NFL can’t be faulted for believing it could schedule literally any of the 32 NFL teams for any prime-time matchup and still draw massive ratings. The people at the NFL believed this because we essentially told them it was true.
Even a Jags-Titans game in recent years would draw huge ratings, which probably led to some laziness when figuring out that daunting prime-time schedule. This will likely be adjusted next year following this year’s wake-up call.
Thursday Night Football
It’s not good football. If it were good football, the league wouldn’t need to concoct some phony “color rush” gimmick to try to get people to watch. Players are not recovered from Sunday’s bruises. Game plans are simplified.
And because every team must play a Thursday game, the matchups often stink. The average margin of victory in Thursday night games this season is 14.4 points. It is — largely — unwatchable.
Deception
While very few people might actually turn off their TVs as a form of protest over DeflateGate or Bountygate or the failures of Roger Goodell and the league office in properly addressing players who commit acts of domestic violence, there is no doubt a mental toll that is taken from so much nonsense constantly surrounding the league.
It might only be a small number, but there must be people who (in the middle of a dreadful 49ers-Bills game) start to question why they’re wasting their time watching this league. Team owners can thank Roger Goodell, largely, for the air of deceit that emanates from the league.
Denial
Roger Goodell telling the world on Wednesday that the NFL stands firmly against sports gambling really says everything that needs to be said about the way the NFL operates. The league treats its viewers and consumers as if they’re idiots. It’s a continuation of the way the league ignored concussions for years.
Now, player safety is a priority, yet known dirty players get away with dirty play, Cam Newton gets his face bashed in on national TV, and players around the league still drop like flies every week, and nobody from the league says boo. They think you’re dumb. You’re finally starting to prove them wrong.
Everybody Stinks
This problem has been apparent to some of us for a few years, but the issue is that despite the league’s insistence that parity exists, very few teams are actually Super Bowl contenders. It’s the same teams in the mix every year.
It’s a Haves/Have Nots league, and the bad teams are bad. Meanwhile in a related story, this week the 1-5 Chicago Bears will play their third prime-time game in a six-week span.
Peyton Manning Is Gone
People liked to watch this guy play football. I haven’t heard his name mentioned much when folks discuss the drop in ratings, but his absence definitely plays a significant role. Networks used to fight every November to get the big Tom Brady-Peyton Manning showdown on their air.
Even last year, when he threw with his right arm the same way most NFL quarterbacks would throw with their left arms, people had to tune in. His games had a special feeling about them. Now? Trevor Siemian throwing 5-yard outs in the final minutes of a game while his Broncos trail by two scores is not exactly captivating television.
Tom Brady Was Suspended
TV networks know that in order to sell games to viewers, you need stars. One inhibitor to that goal is when the league spends $10 million and two years trying to paint their biggest star as some sort of criminal over something that never mattered before in the history of sports.
Whoops. Fact is, more people seem to hate Tom Brady than love him, but they all can’t help but tune in when he’s on their television screens. At least the country was treated to that rousing Jacoby Brissett vs. Houston Texans experience.
(My gif comment on this. Notice the location of this writer)
London
The NFL felt that it had perfected its product in the United States so much that it went ahead and started making international plans in England, China and Mexico. It’s necessary only from the perspective of a corporation in a capitalistic society that must always find a way to increase profits, no matter how high those profits might already be.
But from a football perspective, it’s completely unnecessary. And it makes little sense to force this complicated, clunky sport onto cultures that don’t care much to embrace it. Yet, the NFL persists and seems intent on setting a team in London permanently.
Personality Suppression
The league has a bad reputation for being a corporation that would prefer its “stars” to be nameless, faceless, and above all, replaceable. Throwing 15-yard penalties for the most harmless of celebrations doesn’t do anything to dispel that perception.
Officials Dictate Too Much
In the very first game of the NFL season, the Carolina Panthers trailed the Denver Broncos by one point in the final minutes. Carolina faced a fourth-and-21. The odds were long, and when Cam Newton threw incomplete, the game was lost. But wait! A flag. A penalty on Chris Harris for giving a shove to a wide receiver resulted in a five-yard penalty and, more importantly, an automatic first down.
That is preposterous and it goes against the entire premise of what football is all about. There’s a reason that many sports fans have lost respect and appreciation of the NBA, and it has a lot to do with touch fouls. The NFL at times treats such fouls even softer than the NBA, which should never be the case.
To be sure, there are some other reasons. The car-crash element of the presidential election has certainly stolen some viewers from various games, and there’s no doubt a fringe collection of outspoken flag protectors who are so appalled by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest that they’ve stopped watching football altogether (even though national anthems are almost never aired on Sunday afternoon games).
But add it all up, and it’s simply been difficult for the average NFL fan to get excited about watching 10 hours of football every Sunday. The league is just having trouble filling up its 15-to-18-hour window every week with captivating programming. Any league would; it’s just a new problem for the NFL.
Realistically, ratings will likely fluctuate a bit going forward this season, with some weeks seeing an increase and others seeing a drop. The NFL is not a sinking ship, and the folks in charge are not running around the deck with buckets of water to try to bail it out. It’s merely taking a hit right now, but the fact is that the multi-billion dollar monolith can withstand it.
What this year’s ratings will do is provide a wake-up call to the NFL that the league is going to need to try harder. The days of blindly putting two teams down on a schedule and setting ratings records are over. But that will, presumably, result in the NFL’s leaders strategizing a plan this coming offseason to map out a better plan of how to maximize viewership and, thus, advertising and TV revenue going forward.
-X-
Medium-sized Lebowski
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LesBaker
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So according to Colin ALL sports viewership is down because of the election?
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Why aren't other shows down? How can you connect ONLY sports shows and football games to this election? You cannot, it's a terrible opinion.
LesBaker
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I dislike Kaepernick because he's a douche, and a 49er, and disingenuous............and I have a theory that this is as much ego driven as it is issue driven.
Here's why. The dude loves attention, he likes that spotlight especially when he's "keeping it real" or doing it his way.
Remember the headphones thing a couple of years ago? Beats by Dre headphones are not the official headphones of the NFL, Bose is. Players were asked not to wear any other headphones when addressing the media at the podium and keep other headphones under wraps in the locker room.
CK hadn't worn ANY headphones to a podium before but decided to "protest" by wearing a big pair of Beats by Dre (by the way people who know about that stuff have told me they aren't that good for the money) to the podium. Then he taped over the logo after being fined 10K in an effort to draw even more attention to himself. I think he was warned in between episodes but maybe not.
He likes the limelight, and in this society controversy makes you famous, it gets you noticed. He likes that.
And that's why IMO he started doing this.
I don't disagree that there is a problem with police stepping over the line and doing shit they shouldn't be doing, that's not even debatable unless one is totally out of touch with reality. But what he is doing isn't helping, it's hurting, and this is (IMO) more about him. It has nothing to do with the real issues that need to be solved.
A lot of athletes do tons of stuff in the community, those things make a difference. It's not just about cutting checks and saying I'm donating so I am doing something. If he wants my support he needs to do more than point fingers. That shit can be done by anyone and never solves a fucking thing. That's (IMO) the wrong thing to teach kids, they should be taught to help and communicate and understand. Not to say "look, those are the bad guys and we are the good guys".
He has the right to do what he is doing and I won't support anyone who contributes to taking away a single bit of his liberty, however he won't gain my respect until he himself takes action other that finger pointing.
Mackeyser
Supernovas are where gold forms; the only place.
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I got 2 Warner jerseys that I got for $10 each from the NFL store after he got traded. 90% off. Yeah, one's still in the plastic.
So, other than that one time, historic, $20 purchase... I don't buy gear. I was going to buy a Bradford jersey, but RL stuff made that not happen. And as much as I wanted to show my support for him at the time... That's a pretty weak way to do it in the grand scheme of things.
I wear my one piece of Rams gear... But not buying anymore.
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- #113
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-nfl-is-in-decline/article/2005033
The NFL Is in Decline
From the October 31, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
By GEOFFREY NORMAN
The game wasn't much fun to watch. It was one of those blowouts with things pretty much settled long before the fourth quarter was over. There were the usual penalties, with the officials meeting to discuss whodunit and what to call. These provided opportunities for what are described by the announcers as a "break in the action."
Those would be commercials for everything from Viagra to life insurance. For some reason, there don't seem to be as many beer commercials as there once were. Beer and tires propped up the NFL on television for many years. Perhaps the same guys who used to buy the beer and tires are now thinking Viagra and life insurance.
When there was action on the field, it was often lackluster and sloppy. There was one play that seemed to sum it up. A receiver for the San Francisco 49ers shook loose and was wide open downfield. The Buffalo Bills' defense was guilty, of course, of what the announcers call "blown coverage," and the play should have gone for an easy touchdown. The quarterback, however, underthrew the ball so badly that the receiver was obliged to stand still and wait for it to come to him.
He might have been a center fielder parking himself under a high pop fly. He could have read a newspaper in the time it took the ball to reach him. When it did finally arrive, so had one of the Buffalo defenders. The play went for a big gain but was aesthetically unsatisfying. As was almost everything about the game.
And then there was the political stuff. The quarterback who launched that wounded duck of a pass was Colin Kaepernick. He had just missed winning a Super Bowl three years ago. These days, he is a backup. But he had started this game against the Bills, because the 49ers had lost four games in a row. So Kaepernick started against the Buffalo Bills because . . . well, probably because the coach thought, "Why not? He can't do any worse."
Before that, when he was still on the bench, Kaepernick had managed to make himself more conspicuous than just about any professional football player, with the possible exception of the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who returned in glory from his four-game suspension (about which we all have heard enough) throwing the ball (properly inflated, no doubt) as accurately as ever.
Kaepernick, who doesn't have Brady's arm, had been making news by making a political statement. When "The Star-Spangled Banner" was performed before kickoffs, he would sit or "take a knee," instead of standing. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," he said. It was a protest, a gesture of solidarity, a statement . . . and so on and so forth.
It was also a possible suspect in the whodunit that has consumed professional football this year. Namely, what has happened to the NFL's TV ratings? To say that the NFL is the top-drawing sport on the small screen is an understatement. Last season, NFL games, starting with the Super Bowl (114 million viewers), accounted for 14 of the 15 most-viewed sporting events. (The college football championship game sneaked in at No. 7.)
Indeed, the NFL accounted for 34 of the top 40 televised games. The remainder were college football bowls, the women's World Cup soccer finals, at No. 26, and Game 6 of the NBA basketball finals—aka the LeBron James-Stephen Curry show—at No. 40.
This fall, though, the NFL's popularity has declined enough to be cause for notice and alarm. When ratings slide, the NFL takes a hit not only in its bottom line—which it can afford—but also in its sense of inevitability, which is more dangerous to its psyche.
The National Football League aspires to own the entertainment sphere—to "dominate," as sports lingo would have it. So when ratings declined 11 percent early this season, NFL headquarters sent out a dispatch to all commands, seeking to explain and reassure.
The NFL's explanations were mostly evasions, which we shall come to in a moment. But first let us separate the short term from the long term in this discussion. As John Maynard Keynes so pungently reminded us, "In the long term we are all dead." The only question is: "How long is . . . well, long?"
For the NFL, not very, according to some who have studied the question. There have been signals that the NFL—and all of football—may soon be in for hard times. The game is increasingly brutal, and that brutality is not some fixable flaw. Football is violent by nature, and if you take away the violence, you have soccer without the grace. There is undeniable evidence of brain damage among former football players, some of whom suffer dementia and a few of whom have committed suicide, the reasons for which are unknowable but might plausibly include the beatings they took from the game.
Improvements in equipment and changes in the rules might make the game marginally safer, but perhaps not by enough to keep the lawyers outside the ramparts or, more important, persuade parents that they should let their children play the game. Even without the prospect of lasting brain damage, the game is too rough for many with today's tender sensibilities.
But that is long term. For now, the supply of eager players seems adequate to the needs of the game. And the fans don't seem to mind the big hits. Not, that is, until they are too big. Occasionally, a player has to be strapped to a board before he can be carted off the field to receive medical attention and learn if—as occasionally happens in football—he has been injured in a way that will leave him paralyzed for life.
Still, the violence and the injuries are threats to the popularity of the game down the road and don't seem to have accounted for the precipitous falloff in this season's television ratings. So there are several other theories advanced to account for this drop. Among the least plausible would seem to be the one put forward by the NFL in its memo from the head office to its various franchises—namely, that it is an election year and people have been distracted by politics.
To which one says, huh? An election year might distract people from their normal interests. That's plausible. But this year? For most reliable NFL fans, even a mediocre game would seem preferable to dwelling on the state to which American political life has been reduced this year.
To extend the argument that the decline in football ratings is the result of an intrusion by politics, there is the matter of Kaepernick and his refusal to stand for the national anthem. It's been argued this may have turned some people off the game. They are purists, perhaps, and resent the intrusion of any politics into the game. Or they are patriots and despise gestures of disrespect to flag and country by millionaire, prima donna athletes. Football fans tend to be traditionalists that way.
It could be that some former fans have abandoned the games as the p.c. virus has slowly infected the NFL. One suspects there are plenty of people who quit watching the Academy Awards because they couldn't stand listening to political speeches that pegged the needle in both sanctimony and stupidity.
On the other hand, with football you can let the offenders know how you feel, and this may be an incentive to go to the stadium and do what the good people of Buffalo did as their team annihilated Kaepernick's 49ers. They booed him mercilessly, and good for them.
There may have been a few people out in television land who decided not to tune in and watch the game because they were turned off by Kaepernick and his "protest," but not enough, one would think, to account for more than a point or two in that ratings falloff.
One suspects, in the end, that the problem is much less to do with politics than with the games themselves.
This is an increasingly common complaint among disaffected NFL fans, and it struck me with particular force once the Bills had put the 49ers out of their misery, 45 to 16, in a game with five fumbles on a dry field and a combined 13 penalties.
After the game, Kaepernick made one of those statements of conscience, saying, 'I don't understand what's un-American about fighting for liberty and justice for everybody, for the equality this country says it stands for. To me, I see it as very patriotic and American to uphold the United States to the standards that it says it lives by."
But millions of fans had, by then, changed channels and were watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Green Bay Packers. This game was played in Green Bay, which is a small, blue-collar city in Wisconsin. It's one of those places on the perimeter of the Great Lakes where the Industrial Revolution sowed seeds that sprouted into thousands of factories and a tough, working-class culture of the sort that is dying off so painfully today.
Professional football was a product of these towns and cities, and Green Bay might be the most pure of all football franchises. The town, which has a population of just over 100,000, famously, and uniquely, owns the team.
And the citizens are not passive owners. They care about their Packers, they are emotionally invested in them, and the team has paid dividends for years. So many great players. So many championships. So many memorable games.
One of the most memorable was played against the Dallas Cowboys, who were newcomers to the NFL, on the last day of 1967. The game was known forever more as the "Ice Bowl." The temperature at kickoff was -13 degrees (-48 windchill). The whistle blown by the official to signal the start of the game froze to his lips. When he removed the whistle from his mouth, skin from his lips came with it. The blood did not clot; it froze. He spoke through the scabs for the rest of the game.
This was watched by more than 50,000 people in the stands of an open-air stadium on seats that did not, many of them, have backs. Four of these fans had heart attacks. Many more were treated for exposure. The Packers came from behind and won on a last-minute, one-yard sneak by a quarterback named Starr whose parents must have known he would one day grow up and find glory on the football field and so called him Bart. A century earlier, he would have been the sheriff of Tombstone.
It was a game for the ages and none who watched in person, or on television, would ever forget it or have described it as "entertainment." You don't sit outside for three hours in subzero weather to be "entertained," no matter how much schnapps you have in your thermos. Certainly none of those 50,000 Packers fans who sat in the Arctic cold would have called the game entertaining. They might have fallen back on the old line about how it wasn't life or death; it was a lot more important than that.
The Packers fans who watched this season's game against the Cowboys, almost half a century after the Ice Bowl, actually booed the team they own. The Packers' play was that much of a mess, and the Cowboys handled them easily. And if watching in person was painful for a Packers fan, watching on the television was, too. Painful even if you didn't have a dog in the hunt.
There were so many commercials, for one thing. The NFL and the networks have crafted a way to squeeze the maximum number of ads into the broadcast of a single game, causing viewers to lose interest even as they watch.
According to some studies, the average football game, during which the clock runs for precisely 60 minutes, consists of a mere 11 minutes of action. And this is stretched out over almost four hours of broadcast time. The networks are wearing down the stamina of their viewers.
Their most aggravating tactic is to cut to a commercial after a score, return to "the action" for the kickoff that more and more these days is a mere formality. The kicker boots the ball through the end-zone. It is then placed on the 25-yard line, and before the opposing team takes over there, they cut to yet another commercial. If you cared about the game before the first commercial break, the second one will test your commitment as a fan.
This commitment has probably already been strained by the poor quality of the play. The Packers fans did not boo simply because their team was losing. Even good teams get beat. They booed because the Packers were playing consistently sloppy football.
And why was this? It's hard to say. But it can't help that the games are too long and that the rhythm of play is disrupted, over and over, by the networks' need to "take a break from the action." And then, the team rosters change almost constantly. Players are out for injury, lost to free agency, suspended for one reason or another. Teams do not stick together and operate as a unit the way they once did.
A Green Bay fan could name every starter on that 1967 championship team (and many still can to this day). The lineup had not changed very much from the year before or the year before that. Teams today are put together on the fly. Season to season. Game to game. Even within the game. There is no continuity. No real sense of "team."
And then there is the officiating. So many penalties and so many replays, many of which don't really settle anything. They do, however, slow things down.
The long and the short of it is that the games take too long, and too many are indifferently played by teams that don't really seem to be teams so much as collections of random players who might as well have been selected in a session of "choose up."
And yet, as the quality of the product declines, the NFL seeks to expand the brand. There are those games abroad, in London and Mexico City. There is talk of other venues to which American football might be exported. And all of this "marketing" goes on even as the "base"—that core consumer in Green Bay and elsewhere, who understands the game and brings his own kind of commitment when he watches his team play—grows increasingly disaffected.
The NFL, it sometimes seems, is determined to ape the decline of NASCAR, which sought to expand its reach to venues where stock car racing was a novelty—"entertainment"—at the expense of those places where it was in the blood. Loudon, New Hampshire, will never be Darlington, South Carolina, any more than London, England, will ever be Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Perhaps there is a grand strategy at work here. Maybe the NFL calculates that the game's own violence will drive it to extinction sooner rather than later. And before that happens, they intend to take advantage of every last commercial minute and each and every untapped venue. The seasons will get longer, games will be played in more and more exotic locations, the number of timeouts will increase, and Viagra sales will be maximized—all before those life insurance policies pay out.
"That's entertainment," as they say. And more and more fans will no doubt respond by saying, "Well, if that's entertainment, I say the hell with it."
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
The NFL Is in Decline
From the October 31, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
By GEOFFREY NORMAN
The game wasn't much fun to watch. It was one of those blowouts with things pretty much settled long before the fourth quarter was over. There were the usual penalties, with the officials meeting to discuss whodunit and what to call. These provided opportunities for what are described by the announcers as a "break in the action."
Those would be commercials for everything from Viagra to life insurance. For some reason, there don't seem to be as many beer commercials as there once were. Beer and tires propped up the NFL on television for many years. Perhaps the same guys who used to buy the beer and tires are now thinking Viagra and life insurance.
When there was action on the field, it was often lackluster and sloppy. There was one play that seemed to sum it up. A receiver for the San Francisco 49ers shook loose and was wide open downfield. The Buffalo Bills' defense was guilty, of course, of what the announcers call "blown coverage," and the play should have gone for an easy touchdown. The quarterback, however, underthrew the ball so badly that the receiver was obliged to stand still and wait for it to come to him.
He might have been a center fielder parking himself under a high pop fly. He could have read a newspaper in the time it took the ball to reach him. When it did finally arrive, so had one of the Buffalo defenders. The play went for a big gain but was aesthetically unsatisfying. As was almost everything about the game.
And then there was the political stuff. The quarterback who launched that wounded duck of a pass was Colin Kaepernick. He had just missed winning a Super Bowl three years ago. These days, he is a backup. But he had started this game against the Bills, because the 49ers had lost four games in a row. So Kaepernick started against the Buffalo Bills because . . . well, probably because the coach thought, "Why not? He can't do any worse."
Before that, when he was still on the bench, Kaepernick had managed to make himself more conspicuous than just about any professional football player, with the possible exception of the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who returned in glory from his four-game suspension (about which we all have heard enough) throwing the ball (properly inflated, no doubt) as accurately as ever.
Kaepernick, who doesn't have Brady's arm, had been making news by making a political statement. When "The Star-Spangled Banner" was performed before kickoffs, he would sit or "take a knee," instead of standing. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," he said. It was a protest, a gesture of solidarity, a statement . . . and so on and so forth.
It was also a possible suspect in the whodunit that has consumed professional football this year. Namely, what has happened to the NFL's TV ratings? To say that the NFL is the top-drawing sport on the small screen is an understatement. Last season, NFL games, starting with the Super Bowl (114 million viewers), accounted for 14 of the 15 most-viewed sporting events. (The college football championship game sneaked in at No. 7.)
Indeed, the NFL accounted for 34 of the top 40 televised games. The remainder were college football bowls, the women's World Cup soccer finals, at No. 26, and Game 6 of the NBA basketball finals—aka the LeBron James-Stephen Curry show—at No. 40.
This fall, though, the NFL's popularity has declined enough to be cause for notice and alarm. When ratings slide, the NFL takes a hit not only in its bottom line—which it can afford—but also in its sense of inevitability, which is more dangerous to its psyche.
The National Football League aspires to own the entertainment sphere—to "dominate," as sports lingo would have it. So when ratings declined 11 percent early this season, NFL headquarters sent out a dispatch to all commands, seeking to explain and reassure.
The NFL's explanations were mostly evasions, which we shall come to in a moment. But first let us separate the short term from the long term in this discussion. As John Maynard Keynes so pungently reminded us, "In the long term we are all dead." The only question is: "How long is . . . well, long?"
For the NFL, not very, according to some who have studied the question. There have been signals that the NFL—and all of football—may soon be in for hard times. The game is increasingly brutal, and that brutality is not some fixable flaw. Football is violent by nature, and if you take away the violence, you have soccer without the grace. There is undeniable evidence of brain damage among former football players, some of whom suffer dementia and a few of whom have committed suicide, the reasons for which are unknowable but might plausibly include the beatings they took from the game.
Improvements in equipment and changes in the rules might make the game marginally safer, but perhaps not by enough to keep the lawyers outside the ramparts or, more important, persuade parents that they should let their children play the game. Even without the prospect of lasting brain damage, the game is too rough for many with today's tender sensibilities.
But that is long term. For now, the supply of eager players seems adequate to the needs of the game. And the fans don't seem to mind the big hits. Not, that is, until they are too big. Occasionally, a player has to be strapped to a board before he can be carted off the field to receive medical attention and learn if—as occasionally happens in football—he has been injured in a way that will leave him paralyzed for life.
Still, the violence and the injuries are threats to the popularity of the game down the road and don't seem to have accounted for the precipitous falloff in this season's television ratings. So there are several other theories advanced to account for this drop. Among the least plausible would seem to be the one put forward by the NFL in its memo from the head office to its various franchises—namely, that it is an election year and people have been distracted by politics.
To which one says, huh? An election year might distract people from their normal interests. That's plausible. But this year? For most reliable NFL fans, even a mediocre game would seem preferable to dwelling on the state to which American political life has been reduced this year.
To extend the argument that the decline in football ratings is the result of an intrusion by politics, there is the matter of Kaepernick and his refusal to stand for the national anthem. It's been argued this may have turned some people off the game. They are purists, perhaps, and resent the intrusion of any politics into the game. Or they are patriots and despise gestures of disrespect to flag and country by millionaire, prima donna athletes. Football fans tend to be traditionalists that way.
It could be that some former fans have abandoned the games as the p.c. virus has slowly infected the NFL. One suspects there are plenty of people who quit watching the Academy Awards because they couldn't stand listening to political speeches that pegged the needle in both sanctimony and stupidity.
On the other hand, with football you can let the offenders know how you feel, and this may be an incentive to go to the stadium and do what the good people of Buffalo did as their team annihilated Kaepernick's 49ers. They booed him mercilessly, and good for them.
There may have been a few people out in television land who decided not to tune in and watch the game because they were turned off by Kaepernick and his "protest," but not enough, one would think, to account for more than a point or two in that ratings falloff.
One suspects, in the end, that the problem is much less to do with politics than with the games themselves.
This is an increasingly common complaint among disaffected NFL fans, and it struck me with particular force once the Bills had put the 49ers out of their misery, 45 to 16, in a game with five fumbles on a dry field and a combined 13 penalties.
After the game, Kaepernick made one of those statements of conscience, saying, 'I don't understand what's un-American about fighting for liberty and justice for everybody, for the equality this country says it stands for. To me, I see it as very patriotic and American to uphold the United States to the standards that it says it lives by."
But millions of fans had, by then, changed channels and were watching the Dallas Cowboys play the Green Bay Packers. This game was played in Green Bay, which is a small, blue-collar city in Wisconsin. It's one of those places on the perimeter of the Great Lakes where the Industrial Revolution sowed seeds that sprouted into thousands of factories and a tough, working-class culture of the sort that is dying off so painfully today.
Professional football was a product of these towns and cities, and Green Bay might be the most pure of all football franchises. The town, which has a population of just over 100,000, famously, and uniquely, owns the team.
And the citizens are not passive owners. They care about their Packers, they are emotionally invested in them, and the team has paid dividends for years. So many great players. So many championships. So many memorable games.
One of the most memorable was played against the Dallas Cowboys, who were newcomers to the NFL, on the last day of 1967. The game was known forever more as the "Ice Bowl." The temperature at kickoff was -13 degrees (-48 windchill). The whistle blown by the official to signal the start of the game froze to his lips. When he removed the whistle from his mouth, skin from his lips came with it. The blood did not clot; it froze. He spoke through the scabs for the rest of the game.
This was watched by more than 50,000 people in the stands of an open-air stadium on seats that did not, many of them, have backs. Four of these fans had heart attacks. Many more were treated for exposure. The Packers came from behind and won on a last-minute, one-yard sneak by a quarterback named Starr whose parents must have known he would one day grow up and find glory on the football field and so called him Bart. A century earlier, he would have been the sheriff of Tombstone.
It was a game for the ages and none who watched in person, or on television, would ever forget it or have described it as "entertainment." You don't sit outside for three hours in subzero weather to be "entertained," no matter how much schnapps you have in your thermos. Certainly none of those 50,000 Packers fans who sat in the Arctic cold would have called the game entertaining. They might have fallen back on the old line about how it wasn't life or death; it was a lot more important than that.
The Packers fans who watched this season's game against the Cowboys, almost half a century after the Ice Bowl, actually booed the team they own. The Packers' play was that much of a mess, and the Cowboys handled them easily. And if watching in person was painful for a Packers fan, watching on the television was, too. Painful even if you didn't have a dog in the hunt.
There were so many commercials, for one thing. The NFL and the networks have crafted a way to squeeze the maximum number of ads into the broadcast of a single game, causing viewers to lose interest even as they watch.
According to some studies, the average football game, during which the clock runs for precisely 60 minutes, consists of a mere 11 minutes of action. And this is stretched out over almost four hours of broadcast time. The networks are wearing down the stamina of their viewers.
Their most aggravating tactic is to cut to a commercial after a score, return to "the action" for the kickoff that more and more these days is a mere formality. The kicker boots the ball through the end-zone. It is then placed on the 25-yard line, and before the opposing team takes over there, they cut to yet another commercial. If you cared about the game before the first commercial break, the second one will test your commitment as a fan.
This commitment has probably already been strained by the poor quality of the play. The Packers fans did not boo simply because their team was losing. Even good teams get beat. They booed because the Packers were playing consistently sloppy football.
And why was this? It's hard to say. But it can't help that the games are too long and that the rhythm of play is disrupted, over and over, by the networks' need to "take a break from the action." And then, the team rosters change almost constantly. Players are out for injury, lost to free agency, suspended for one reason or another. Teams do not stick together and operate as a unit the way they once did.
A Green Bay fan could name every starter on that 1967 championship team (and many still can to this day). The lineup had not changed very much from the year before or the year before that. Teams today are put together on the fly. Season to season. Game to game. Even within the game. There is no continuity. No real sense of "team."
And then there is the officiating. So many penalties and so many replays, many of which don't really settle anything. They do, however, slow things down.
The long and the short of it is that the games take too long, and too many are indifferently played by teams that don't really seem to be teams so much as collections of random players who might as well have been selected in a session of "choose up."
And yet, as the quality of the product declines, the NFL seeks to expand the brand. There are those games abroad, in London and Mexico City. There is talk of other venues to which American football might be exported. And all of this "marketing" goes on even as the "base"—that core consumer in Green Bay and elsewhere, who understands the game and brings his own kind of commitment when he watches his team play—grows increasingly disaffected.
The NFL, it sometimes seems, is determined to ape the decline of NASCAR, which sought to expand its reach to venues where stock car racing was a novelty—"entertainment"—at the expense of those places where it was in the blood. Loudon, New Hampshire, will never be Darlington, South Carolina, any more than London, England, will ever be Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Perhaps there is a grand strategy at work here. Maybe the NFL calculates that the game's own violence will drive it to extinction sooner rather than later. And before that happens, they intend to take advantage of every last commercial minute and each and every untapped venue. The seasons will get longer, games will be played in more and more exotic locations, the number of timeouts will increase, and Viagra sales will be maximized—all before those life insurance policies pay out.
"That's entertainment," as they say. And more and more fans will no doubt respond by saying, "Well, if that's entertainment, I say the hell with it."
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
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http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/10/27/nfl-ratings-national-anthem-protests-poll/
Poll: National Anthem Protests Leading Cause For NFL Ratings Drop
By Matt Dolloff, CBS Boston
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
BOSTON (CBS) — There are many reasons why the NFL’s ratings are down in 2016. You may be dismissive of the very idea that the backlash to the national anthem protests, sparked by the 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick, has played a role in the NFL’s TV ratings, which have dropped by about 12 percent year-over-year. To continue to dismiss that is to blatantly ignore legitimate data on the subject.
A fresh poll from Seton Hall surveyed 841 adults across the U.S. Each respondent was asked to identify seven separate factors as a reason for the NFL ratings drop, allowing them to answer “yes” or “no” for each of them. The leading factor, according to the poll, was the national anthem protests, which scored “yes” at a rate of 56 percent.
Other answers also scored “yes” at a high rate, including 50 percent of “yeses” for coverage of the presidential election, 47 percent for the league’s handling of domestic violence cases, 44 percent for the over-saturation of the market, 39 percent for increased interest in postseason baseball, and 33 percent for controversy over head injuries and player safety.
Interestingly enough, the lowest score, tied with player safety at 33 percent, was “a decline in quality of play on the field.” Many would cite this as the overriding factor to all of this, and it certainly is factoring in. It’s easier to turn the games off for other reasons if the games aren’t fun to watch in the first place.
The point here, however, is that there are many Americans out there who view the players’ national anthem protest as a sign of disrespect to the American flag, the sanctity of which they take very seriously. Hundreds of fans have emailed me on the subject, and many of them agreed with Kaepernick’s right to protest injustices but disagreed with his method of doing so.
In some circles, Kaepernick’s protests have actually had the opposite effect, sparking discussions over the national anthem and patriotism rather than the issue that he wishes to raise awareness of among citizens, police violence against African-Americans. Many emailers have cited the NFL’s decisions to not only allow players to protest the national anthem but disallow the Dallas Cowboys from honoring fallen police officers with a decal on their helmets as a “tipping point” for them to ultimately turn away from pro football.
Kaepernick certainly has a right to protest over that issue, just as now-former NFL viewers have the right to change the channel over what they view as blatant disrespect of the American flag and national anthem. The NFL has long been one of the country’s most popular forms of escapist entertainment, and the injection of social and political issues into the broadcasts has turned a number of fans away. It may not be the only cause for the NFL’s ratings decline, but it may be a bigger factor than you think.
Poll: National Anthem Protests Leading Cause For NFL Ratings Drop
By Matt Dolloff, CBS Boston
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
BOSTON (CBS) — There are many reasons why the NFL’s ratings are down in 2016. You may be dismissive of the very idea that the backlash to the national anthem protests, sparked by the 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick, has played a role in the NFL’s TV ratings, which have dropped by about 12 percent year-over-year. To continue to dismiss that is to blatantly ignore legitimate data on the subject.
A fresh poll from Seton Hall surveyed 841 adults across the U.S. Each respondent was asked to identify seven separate factors as a reason for the NFL ratings drop, allowing them to answer “yes” or “no” for each of them. The leading factor, according to the poll, was the national anthem protests, which scored “yes” at a rate of 56 percent.
Other answers also scored “yes” at a high rate, including 50 percent of “yeses” for coverage of the presidential election, 47 percent for the league’s handling of domestic violence cases, 44 percent for the over-saturation of the market, 39 percent for increased interest in postseason baseball, and 33 percent for controversy over head injuries and player safety.
Interestingly enough, the lowest score, tied with player safety at 33 percent, was “a decline in quality of play on the field.” Many would cite this as the overriding factor to all of this, and it certainly is factoring in. It’s easier to turn the games off for other reasons if the games aren’t fun to watch in the first place.
The point here, however, is that there are many Americans out there who view the players’ national anthem protest as a sign of disrespect to the American flag, the sanctity of which they take very seriously. Hundreds of fans have emailed me on the subject, and many of them agreed with Kaepernick’s right to protest injustices but disagreed with his method of doing so.
In some circles, Kaepernick’s protests have actually had the opposite effect, sparking discussions over the national anthem and patriotism rather than the issue that he wishes to raise awareness of among citizens, police violence against African-Americans. Many emailers have cited the NFL’s decisions to not only allow players to protest the national anthem but disallow the Dallas Cowboys from honoring fallen police officers with a decal on their helmets as a “tipping point” for them to ultimately turn away from pro football.
Kaepernick certainly has a right to protest over that issue, just as now-former NFL viewers have the right to change the channel over what they view as blatant disrespect of the American flag and national anthem. The NFL has long been one of the country’s most popular forms of escapist entertainment, and the injection of social and political issues into the broadcasts has turned a number of fans away. It may not be the only cause for the NFL’s ratings decline, but it may be a bigger factor than you think.
LesBaker
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I won't be surprised if the NFL adopts a rule similar to what the NBA has, which requires all the members of the team down to the waterboys to stand at attention.
The NFL can live with this for one year, but not on a permanent basis. The hands up don't shoot wasn't good but this is even worse.
LesBaker
Mr. Savant
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It's not pRon.
LorenzoTheLimner
Rookie
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One word.
Kodi
I have it installed on my laptop, phone, and tablet, and on Firestick connected to my flatscreen. Greatest platform ever. Anyone who can operate a computer, chances are they have it or have installed it for others.
Kodi
I have it installed on my laptop, phone, and tablet, and on Firestick connected to my flatscreen. Greatest platform ever. Anyone who can operate a computer, chances are they have it or have installed it for others.
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- 15,985
I don't know what sports app you have on it but sports devil is utter rubbish. Pro sports wasn't any better and died in the arse on my version. Can you please recommend a sports app that works well for the nfl. Thank you in advance.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...e-fall-nfl-looking-at-ways-to-speed-up-games/
With TV ratings in sharp decline, NFL looking at ways to speed up games
By Matt Bonesteel
In 2010, the Wall Street Journal calculated that an average NFL contest contained only 11 minutes of actual game action, which is startling when you consider the average length of an NFL game: Through 11 weeks of the 2015 season, games were taking 3 hours 9 minutes 26 seconds to complete, and for the 2014 season in full it was 3:05.46. Last weekend’s games took an average of 3:12 to complete.
You get the idea: An average NFL game will contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes of actual play and around three hours of commercials, replays, replay reviews, timeouts, halftimes, huddles and breaks for injuries. And the league wonders why its television ratings are dropping like a stone. It’s not just because of the presidential election, which is now over.
In any case, the league certainly is aware of the issue, and on Wednesday one of its top executives suggested that exceedingly long games may be part of the problem.
“Could they be shorter? Could they be better? Are replays too long?” Brian Rolapp, NFL Media executive vice president and NFL Network president and chief executive, told an audience at a National Association of Broadcasters convention in New York. “We are constantly look at those things to make the pace of the games more interesting.”
Rolapp seemed to suggest that televisions viewers also are turned off by all the commercial breaks, that those touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial sequences that bog down so many games might not be the best way to keep viewers watching.
“In a world where Netflix has no commercials and consumers are used to 15 seconds of pre-roll, is there a better way to do commercials with our broadcast partners?” he said.
And while league officials “are not overly surprised” by the ratings drop this year and “are not overly worried about it,” Rolapp said the league is considering everything in terms of possible changes.
“If we don’t keep an open mind about preserving some flexibility, any measure of success you have can go away pretty quickly,” he said. “We look constantly at improving the rules of the game, the safety of the game and the quality of the game — even if that means changing things that some people think are sacred cows.”
https://theringer.com/week-10-nfl-picks-the-moment-of-tv-ratings-truth-1256c169e2f1#.yyvi17oyi
The Moment of TV Ratings Truth
Kevin Clark
Staff Writer, The Ringer
Sunday is a big day for a lot of people. Tom Brady will face his first big test of the season, against Seattle, and Dak Prescott will play in perhaps his most marquee game to date, on the road against Ben Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh. But no one has more at stake this weekend than the NFL itself.
After two months of astoundingly low ratings by typical NFL standards, Sunday might be the league’s biggest day in years. Prime-time games are down by double digits, and even great games like Monday night’s Seattle-Buffalo thriller, which was the lowest Week 9 Monday night game since 2007, haven’t been able to help.
While a close examination of every variable points to oversaturation as the true culprit, many have posited that the election has also taken eyeballs away from the game. After all, as a Fox executive recently noted, cable news viewership on Sundays almost doubled during the leadup to November 8. Perhaps this really was an inevitable but temporary dip for a league that, as commissioner Roger Goodell pointed out, increased ratings 27 percent in a decade.
That’s why those I spoke to in the league and the TV industry will be watching so closely on the first Sunday following the election. It’s the first test in a new climate, and what’s more, it’s a prime slate. Dallas-Pittsburgh is a classic matchup, while Seattle–New England is a pairing so strong it would take the television equivalent of throwing the ball at the 1-yard line in the Super Bowl to blow it. (What, too soon?)
If the ratings bounce back immediately, we’ll know the election really did contribute to the dip. If they’re up but not back to normal, that’ll still be encouraging for the league. But if they bottom out again, it’ll be be time for the NFL to be seriously concerned.
Last year at this time, 23 million people watched the Eagles and Cowboys on Sunday night. Most of the people I spoke to anticipate that the league will start to see some improvement this weekend, but that with post-election politics continuing to dominate the news cycle for weeks if not months, we won’t see the unimpeachable totals of the 2015 football campaign until much later in the season, if at all.
The NFL is already preparing for the possibility that it won’t instantly go back to being TV’s top dog, openly considering ways to improve its television product. The league’s media czar Brian Rolapp said this week that the sport could look at changing things that are “sacred cows” to the sport, like pace of play.
Those kinds of considerations are a first in the modern era of the NFL, and that matters, because regardless of what happens to the ratings the rest of the year, the league’s status as an impenetrable force has been shaken. Remember, the initial presidential debate/NFL hullabaloo was over whether the NFL was such a behemoth that it would overshadow the political process; we now know that it was the other way around.
Rarely over the last three decades has anything overshadowed the league. A few years ago, an NFL executive told me that the league office stopped showing team owners information on how the NFL did against other sports, because it was no longer that impressive to beat those sports so badly. Instead, they showed the owners how football ratings compared to literally everything else on television: prime-time scripted dramas, sitcoms, you name it. The executive specifically mentioned a Big Bang Theory ratings comparison (guess who won).
The NFL used to be able to take on all comers and win. Now, for the first time in a long time, it will enter a Sunday worried about its grip on the television landscape.
With TV ratings in sharp decline, NFL looking at ways to speed up games
By Matt Bonesteel
In 2010, the Wall Street Journal calculated that an average NFL contest contained only 11 minutes of actual game action, which is startling when you consider the average length of an NFL game: Through 11 weeks of the 2015 season, games were taking 3 hours 9 minutes 26 seconds to complete, and for the 2014 season in full it was 3:05.46. Last weekend’s games took an average of 3:12 to complete.
You get the idea: An average NFL game will contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes of actual play and around three hours of commercials, replays, replay reviews, timeouts, halftimes, huddles and breaks for injuries. And the league wonders why its television ratings are dropping like a stone. It’s not just because of the presidential election, which is now over.
In any case, the league certainly is aware of the issue, and on Wednesday one of its top executives suggested that exceedingly long games may be part of the problem.
“Could they be shorter? Could they be better? Are replays too long?” Brian Rolapp, NFL Media executive vice president and NFL Network president and chief executive, told an audience at a National Association of Broadcasters convention in New York. “We are constantly look at those things to make the pace of the games more interesting.”
Rolapp seemed to suggest that televisions viewers also are turned off by all the commercial breaks, that those touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial sequences that bog down so many games might not be the best way to keep viewers watching.
“In a world where Netflix has no commercials and consumers are used to 15 seconds of pre-roll, is there a better way to do commercials with our broadcast partners?” he said.
And while league officials “are not overly surprised” by the ratings drop this year and “are not overly worried about it,” Rolapp said the league is considering everything in terms of possible changes.
“If we don’t keep an open mind about preserving some flexibility, any measure of success you have can go away pretty quickly,” he said. “We look constantly at improving the rules of the game, the safety of the game and the quality of the game — even if that means changing things that some people think are sacred cows.”
https://theringer.com/week-10-nfl-picks-the-moment-of-tv-ratings-truth-1256c169e2f1#.yyvi17oyi
The Moment of TV Ratings Truth
Kevin Clark
Staff Writer, The Ringer
Sunday is a big day for a lot of people. Tom Brady will face his first big test of the season, against Seattle, and Dak Prescott will play in perhaps his most marquee game to date, on the road against Ben Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh. But no one has more at stake this weekend than the NFL itself.
After two months of astoundingly low ratings by typical NFL standards, Sunday might be the league’s biggest day in years. Prime-time games are down by double digits, and even great games like Monday night’s Seattle-Buffalo thriller, which was the lowest Week 9 Monday night game since 2007, haven’t been able to help.
While a close examination of every variable points to oversaturation as the true culprit, many have posited that the election has also taken eyeballs away from the game. After all, as a Fox executive recently noted, cable news viewership on Sundays almost doubled during the leadup to November 8. Perhaps this really was an inevitable but temporary dip for a league that, as commissioner Roger Goodell pointed out, increased ratings 27 percent in a decade.
That’s why those I spoke to in the league and the TV industry will be watching so closely on the first Sunday following the election. It’s the first test in a new climate, and what’s more, it’s a prime slate. Dallas-Pittsburgh is a classic matchup, while Seattle–New England is a pairing so strong it would take the television equivalent of throwing the ball at the 1-yard line in the Super Bowl to blow it. (What, too soon?)
If the ratings bounce back immediately, we’ll know the election really did contribute to the dip. If they’re up but not back to normal, that’ll still be encouraging for the league. But if they bottom out again, it’ll be be time for the NFL to be seriously concerned.
Last year at this time, 23 million people watched the Eagles and Cowboys on Sunday night. Most of the people I spoke to anticipate that the league will start to see some improvement this weekend, but that with post-election politics continuing to dominate the news cycle for weeks if not months, we won’t see the unimpeachable totals of the 2015 football campaign until much later in the season, if at all.
The NFL is already preparing for the possibility that it won’t instantly go back to being TV’s top dog, openly considering ways to improve its television product. The league’s media czar Brian Rolapp said this week that the sport could look at changing things that are “sacred cows” to the sport, like pace of play.
Those kinds of considerations are a first in the modern era of the NFL, and that matters, because regardless of what happens to the ratings the rest of the year, the league’s status as an impenetrable force has been shaken. Remember, the initial presidential debate/NFL hullabaloo was over whether the NFL was such a behemoth that it would overshadow the political process; we now know that it was the other way around.
Rarely over the last three decades has anything overshadowed the league. A few years ago, an NFL executive told me that the league office stopped showing team owners information on how the NFL did against other sports, because it was no longer that impressive to beat those sports so badly. Instead, they showed the owners how football ratings compared to literally everything else on television: prime-time scripted dramas, sitcoms, you name it. The executive specifically mentioned a Big Bang Theory ratings comparison (guess who won).
The NFL used to be able to take on all comers and win. Now, for the first time in a long time, it will enter a Sunday worried about its grip on the television landscape.
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You mean the nation wasn't glued to their sets last night to witness the epic battle of the titans with the Browns facing The Ravens?
Yep something must be wrong.....
Yep something must be wrong.....