The NFL season is three weeks old and, as has been quite common over the last five or so years, the topic of the league’s TV ratings has been a political talking point. But in many of these politicized conversations, context is completely absent. Yes, the NFL’s ratings are down through three weeks, but what does that really mean?

(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)

First off, the NFL is still dominating the sports world, even with a ratings drop. Since the league’s return to play on September 10th, 13 game windows have drawn at least ten million viewers. The least-watched game of the year, Week 3’s Thursday Night Football matchup between the Dolphins and Jaguars, has drawn more viewers than every other sporting event since Labor Day weekend. Think about that for a minute – a Thursday night game on cable between two teams from Florida that missed the playoffs in 2019 has drawn more viewers than every NHL playoff game, every MLB game that has aired this season, and all but one NBA playoff game (which outdrew it by a couple thousand people). That’s how high the bar is for the NFL – it’s beating the tar out of every other sport, and some people are still trying to spin this decline as a failure.

And while the NFL dominates its competition, the fact that it even has competition this year is new. Usually on Sundays in the fall, the NFL only has to compete with MLB for the month of September and then the playoffs in October (when MLB can’t avoid going head to head with the league). This year, the NBA and NHL playoffs have been rolling along, with many games going head to head with the NFL. Yes, the NFL trucks those sports on a direct head to head comparison, but how many of the fans watching those sports would have watched the NFL if it aired uncontested, as it normally does?

A perfect example came this past Sunday. Only 3.4 million people watched Game 6 of the Heat-Celtics series on ESPN. Nearly 18 million people watched Sunday Night Football. Head to head, the NBA got crushed. But the SNF matchup between the Packers and Saints was watched by roughly 800,000 fewer people than last year’s Week 3 game. If that basketball game wasn’t on, how many of those fans would have instead watched the NFL? If the answer is “more than a quarter of them,” SNF would be looking at a Week 3 increase in viewership rather than a decline.

Of course, this isn’t true for every window. You can’t blame other sports for Sunday afternoon declines. CBS in particular has had a hard luck start to the season, with drops in every window they’ve had this year. This is where markets come into play.

New York and Los Angeles are the country’s two biggest markets, and when more people are watching in those markets, your viewership in the country as a whole will naturally be higher. However, the Giants and Jets stink, and the Chargers don’t have much of a fanbase in Los Angeles. So of course, CBS aired the Jets and Chargers in those markets during their Week 1 singleheader, the Giants in the early half of their Week 2 doubleheader in New York, and the Jets and Chargers once again in their Week 3 singleheader. In Weeks 1 and 3, fans in those markets were deprived of far more interesting games (Raiders-Panthers, Dolphins-Patriots, and Raiders-Patriots) that might have been able to draw in more casual fans. Instead, those fans likely did something else, or flipped over to Fox, as opposed to watching garbage matchups. Is all of this a problem for the NFL? Sure. But the competition issue is a short-term one, with the NHL playoffs wrapped up and the NBA Finals likely coming to an end next week. There’s still the elephant in

the room regarding the election season over the next four-plus weeks, but I’m genuinely curious if people will punt on devouring the news cycle after this week’s unanimously derided debate.

Regarding the issues in New York and Los Angeles, there isn’t a whole lot the NFL can do there aside from hope that local teams capture the imagination of audiences in those markets (like the Rams are doing to some degree in LA). If the teams in those markets continue to fail on the field, those fans desperate to watch winners just won’t bother watching, and that doesn’t help the league as a whole.

In short, I’d be surprised if we don’t start seeing positive progression on some of the national windows (including Sunday Night Football) in the near future. The local windows, however, are a whole different issue, and I think the NFL would be fine writing those off as isolated occurrences.

Joe Lucia
Joe Lucia

Sports Media Analyst

Joe Lucia has been covering sports media since 2011, and is a fan of the Ravens, Braves, and Manchester City. He was born and raised in Harrisburg, PA, but now makes his home in southern California with his wife.

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