by A.J. Moore
Are changing viewing habits to blame for this year’s flagging NFL ratings?
The NFL featured a number of intriguing storylines this past season.
In just the NFC East alone, a pair of rookies in the Dallas backfield made the franchise America’s Team once again, and for a short period, Philadelphia was renamed Wentzelvania. Then, during the playoffs, Odell Beckham Jr. found more trouble on a beach in Miami than he did in the bright lights, big city of Manhattan.
Still, the most noteworthy aspect of the NFL year was a noticeable decline in its Nielsen ratings as fewer people decided the games were appointment television.
The Denver Post called the league’s drop in viewership “the NFL’s TV ratings crash of 2016” and stated that “for the first time since the 1990s the NFL’s supreme dominance of televised sports has faded.”
Losing so many eyeballs was a shock to the system of the league long considered the Golden Goose of sports properties. Reasons why people were leaving the NFL television caravan morphed into a popular topic to discuss throughout traditional and social media outlets.
Common speculation about the drop in interest centered on the protest fans were showing after hearing about so many players involved with domestic abuse cases. Others felt fans were having misgivings of enjoying games during the concussion enlightenment era. And plenty of other pundits pointed towards Colin Kaepernick’s signs of disrespect toward the American flag and the lasting hangover from Deflategate.
Throw in poor quarterback play, too many penalties and drawn out broadcasts as other logical hypotheses.
Sure, those aforementioned factors dented the league’s popularity, however they are not the main reason fewer people are tuning into the NFL. Ironically, the media environment that once ushered the league into behemoth status is now the root of its demise.
The media marketplace is not only more crowded, it’s full of new inhabitants.
There are a growing number of cord cutters who no longer see the need for the monthly extortion notice that comes from the cable company. In an age of on-demand viewing, sports remains cable television’s staple programming but say hello to the wave of Millennial “cord nevers” who have lived life without a cable connection and have found their entertainment via a computer/tablet/phone screen.
Of course the league is losing ratings; fewer people in general are watching that antiquated piece of furniture in the middle of the living room.
The expansion of fantasy sports is another unintended negative consequence. Once a supplement to the NFL experience, now many fans choose to follow their players instead of the game itself. The thrill of constant and changing updates of a fantasy matchup can be more appealing than investing time watching the same two teams knocking heads for three plus hours.
Gone are the days of Sunday afternoons when the 1 and 4 o’clock game windows were a prized wintertime sanctuary for a scarcely available product.
Games on Sundays, Saturdays, Mondays and Thursdays make the NFL precariously overexposed. A weekly cavalcade of Jaguars-Titans matchups on an almost nightly basis isn’t must-see-TV.
The NFL is also streaming some of those games on Twitter, but Nielsen has yet to determine how to quantify those viewers into its overall ratings numbers.
Ardent NFL fans have come to a point where they need a pigskin respite and they are finding it while binge watching Narcos at the expense of the modern day American pastime.
I’ll devour a two-inch porterhouse steak once in a while, but I can’t eat it four times a week. Sometimes a salad is needed. This season a growing population of NFL fans are searching for and have found alternatives for their viewing diets.
Associate Professor of Journalism A.J. Moore is the director of Rider’s program in sports media.