Skip to comments.
Searching For A Fix For Football's TV Fumble
.tvnewscheck.com ^ | Oct 21, 2016 | Harry A. Jessell
Posted on October 21, 2016 at 9:13:06 PM EDT by 11th_VA
In this wacky, topsy-turvy biz we call television, the one constant has been the NFL. It brings in the viewers and helps bring them back for other programming. The ad dollars pile up at a predictable rate.
Until this season.
From the start, the NFL and its TV distributors have noticed the ratings have not been measuring up to last season.
On Wednesday, Nielsen ratings cruncher Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group published a report that concludes that viewership among adults 18-49, live plus same day, is off 15.1%.
The big question is why. And it's just not the NFL and TV suits who are trying to answer it. It's been the subject on sports radio and among sports columnists, bloggers and everyday fans.
Two execs with much to gain or lose from the NFL on TV, CBS CEO Les Moonves and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, this week acknowledged publicly that there is a problem, but offered little on the cause, let alone a solution.
“Have they sliced it and diced it too much? Is there too much product out there?” Moonves asked at a Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. “I really don’t know.”
Theories for the trouble abound. Here are several:
(Snip bogus theories)
The real question is what is different this season that would cause such a sudden and significant loss of viewership.
I would trace it to the Trump phenomenon. Whether you like him or not, the man is leading a revolution — primarily of white working class males — against "the establishment," of which the NFL is an entertainment cornerstone.
With its $20+ parking and $10+ beers, seat licenses and high prices for bad seats, the NFL long ago moved up in class, leaving its original blue collar backers far behind so it can rub elbows with corporate America.
Goodell this week said San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick's protesting of police violence against African-Americans by not standing for the national anthem is not a significant factor in the declining ratings.
Don't believe it. A Quinnipiac University poll released Oct. 11 poll found that 63% of white adults disapprove of the protest. Only 30% favor it.
Trump himself has blasted Kaepernick, reaching back to the 1960s for his response. The USA, he said, love it or leave it.
It is not unreasonable to presume that some percentage of Trump's millions of followers have decided to boycott the NFL on TV.
Wieser's research reinforces this theory. The loss of viewership (again adults 18-49, live-plus-same-day), it says, is far from uniform across class and race.
While viewership dropped 14.1% in homes with more than $75,000 in annual income, it was down a whopping 28% in homes with less than $75,000.
In homes with a black head of household, the decline was 9.7% compared to 15.2% with a white head of household.
All broadcasters have a stake in seeing the NFL return to full health. On a live-plus-three-day basis, the Wieser research finds, NFL games accounted for 8.6% of all TV viewing (cable and satellite included) during the first five weeks of the football season. That a huge percentage relative to the number of TV hours the NFL actually fills.
If the viewership doesn't rebound after political passions cool and playoff races heat up in November and December, the NFL and their TV partners will have a real problem on their hands, one they cannot ignore.
