The National Football League is dealing with a crisis as television ratings are sinking like Indiana Jones in quicksand. Except there’s no Shia LaBeouf to throw the NFL a vine to help pull them out of this pit.
There’s plenty of excuses that executives at the NFL office are throwing out there. “Oh it’s the election” or “We are still number one on primetime so what’s the worry” or “It’s all Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem protests”. Well, I hate to tell the NFL, but, their product has been oversaturated.Before the NFL decided in 2012 to have a Thursday night game every week it was a league that had games on Sunday and Monday. Now there’s those Thursday games, the occasional Sunday morning at 8:30, because they’re in London, your normal noon kickoffs, then the 3:25pm games, Sunday night football, and finally Monday night.
That is a ton of football to try to keep up with.
In 2012 NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell touted the continued growth of the NFL and its network saying, “We’re going to be playing Thursday night games from Week 2 to Week 15,” in addition to the annual Thursday night regular-season opener, Goodell said. As for fans who don’t get NFL Network, Goodell said it’s time for the holdout cable companies to get in line or risk losing NFL fans. “The market for NFL Network is here,” Goodell said. “And it’s going to continue to grow.” (PFT)
But Houston Texan’s owner Bob McNair wants to chalk it up to players taking a knee during the anthem. “People come to the game because they want to get away from what’s happening in their everyday lives,” McNair said. “When you bring those types of things into the scene, yeah, it will turn some people off. But the main thing we try to do is to say, ‘We recognize your concern. Let’s do something about it.” (USA Today)
They are a lot like World Wrestling Entertainment.
When the WWE was in their heyday they only operated on Monday nights and once a month on a Sunday for a pay per view. Then they expanded to Thursday’s. Now, there’s a WWE show on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, a pay per view every other Sunday, and a network where you can go to watch original content. It’s extremely hard to keep up with if you are a wrestling fan.
Now both organizations are seeing a steep decline in their ratings. And, both have their reasons to stick their heads into the sand. During Week 6, when the Houston Texans hosted the Indianapolis Colts on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, ratings hit their lowest mark since 2011.
A game where there were zero National Anthem protests.
Goodell brushed it off saying, “We don’t think we’ve lost viewers,” Goodell said. “We’re doing everything, not just to get them to tune in but to get them to stay tuned in.” (Houston Chronicle)
The Texans were the subject of another television rating disaster as their Monday night game against the Denver Broncos, that saw Brock Osweiler return to face his former team, drew it’s lowest Monday night rating since 2012.
As Sports Media Watch puts it in to perspective, “The Week 7 Texans/Broncos Monday Night Football game had a 6.7 final rating and 11.2 million viewers on ESPN, down 14% in ratings and 8% in viewership from Ravens/Cardinals last year (7.8, 12.2M) and down 17% and 16%, respectively, from Steelers/Texans in 2014 (8.1, 13.3M).”
So maybe people aren’t tuning out because of someone taking a knee and more so because it’s hard to stay tuned in to a game when Osweiler is horribly missing his wide receivers and dragging the game into the mud.
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