AROUND THE NFL
TV viewership going up year-over-year on both sides of border ... Norman should keep his eyes off Hollywood and do his job ... Jags moving to London? How about Toronto first?
News and views from around the NFL, with Week 6 under way:
NFL TV RATINGS ARE UP IN U.S. AND CANADA
NEWS: Reports out the States this week continue to indicate that traditional TV viewership of NFL games is up year-overyear.
Although cable/satellite/ network TV viewership continues to plummet in all program categories across North America, as people — especially teens and millennials — more and more tend to watch programs they want at the time and on the platform of their convenience, NFL viewership is up 3% year-over-year, according to U.S. reports.
This reverses the trend of 2016 and 2017, in which the league’s ratings declined up to 10% each year, even if those drops weren’t as severe as for overall TV network viewership.
In Canada, Bell Media – parent company of the CTV and TSN families of channels, which carry English- and French-language NFL telecasts north of the border — on Thursday informed Postmedia that compared to the same time periods a year ago, total viewership on CTV, TSN and the French-language RDS increased 35% in Week 3, and 22% in Week 4.
The asterisk on these sharp increases is that Bell Media’s CTV2 network now carries early-afternoon games on Sundays this year, whereas only the main CTV network and TSN carried games in that time slot in previous years.
VIEW: There’s no mistaking that interest in the NFL is up this year, what with scoring and passing at record paces, and all the new young quarterbacks dazzling week after week, such as Patrick
Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs and Jared Goff of the Los Angeles Rams. Especially considering that just a year ago, scoring got off to its slowest-pace start since the 1990s.
It’s understandable, then, that ratings are up everywhere.
In Canada, it’s interesting that Bell Media continues to add more main-network NFL programming. That is, to either CTV or CTV2. Last season NFL Sunday games regularly thumped late-season Sunday CFL games, with a November Dallas-Pittsburgh game even outdrawing the CFL Eastern semifinal between Saskatchewan and Ottawa, 981,000 viewers to 903,000.
The only sports program that regularly outdraws the NFL late Sunday afternoon game in Canada from October through December is the early Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night.
NFL Sunday night viewership last year in Canada skyrocketed 42% over 2016, by adding Bell’s simulcast feed to “free” CTV2 network in addition to TSN. Monday night viewership rose 8% a year ago, and Thursday night shot up 28% with the switch from Sportsnet to both TSN and CTV2.
The NFL is an entrenched moneymaker again for Bell, especially now that U.S. President Donald Trump struck down the CRTC decision to allow U.S. Super Bowl ads into Canada, which drained CTV and TSN’s collective Super Bowl ratings the past two seasons by nearly 40%.
As viewership of traditional prime-time programming continues to erode, don’t be surprised if the main network (CTV) some year sooner than later picks up NFL games three nights a week: Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. That day is coming.
IS JOSH NORMAN TOO DISTRACTED BY HIS CELEBRITY?
NEWS: The Washington Redskins cornerback, viewed for the past few seasons as one of the NFL’s best at his position, is taking a lot of guff this week for being benched to start the second half of Monday night’s blowout loss in New Orleans, after he got burned for the long TD pass that gave Drew
Brees the NFL career record for most passing yards. Saints WR Michael
Thomas got into a war of words with Josh Norman after the game on Twitter, and even a former teammate criticized him for going Hollywood.
“I’m a target, man,” Norman said this week, per ESPN.com. “I am. I’m a hot button. You press it, you’re going to get a ring. It comes with the territory.”
Norman did appear in the spring on the popular Dancing With the Stars TV show, and this week he said he wants to become an actor after football.
“I don’t know what to say … I can say it’s true. I have (gone) Hollywood.”
VIEW: Gulp. It’s never a good sign when an NFL player, or any pro athlete, starts thinking too much about his post-career career. Because that usually compels the post-career career to begin prematurely, as a result. Like, almost right away.
Look, Norman is still, or at least can be, a topshelf cover corner. The Redskins need him to be one, for it appears the Redskins have as much chance as anybody to win the mediocre NFC East.
They actually lead the division at 2-2.
Hollywood can wait. Keep locking down those receivers, Josh.
DOES SHAD KHAN REALLY INTEND TO RELOCATE THE JAGUARS TO LONDON?
NEWS: The Jacksonville Jaguars owner is nearing completion of a purchase of London’s legendary Wembley Stadium. The Daily
Mail reports that his number-crunchers are investigating how he might keep the franchise based in Jacksonville but play all home games at Wembley, not just once a year, as now. And without getting screwed by the systemic U.K. thievery otherwise known as the national tax code, exposed and rendered infamous for all time by George Harrison in his classic 1966 Beatles song “Taxman” (“There’s one for you, 19 for me. Cuz I’m the Taxman …”).
A spokesman for Khan dismissed the report as so outlandish it wasn’t worth commenting on further.
VIEW: If Khan isn’t the richest NFL owner after Microsoft co-founding Paul Allen of the Seattle Seahawks, he’s in the conversation. And he might not have any rivals as the smartest, humblest or most reasonable of owners.
The self-made car-parts magnate and multi-billionaire owns factories in numerous countries, including many in Central Ontario. In fact, he visits the Toronto area so often on business, he told me earlier this year, that’s why he bought the swanky downtown Four Seasons hotel two years ago.
Khan never will be able to stop the Jags-to-London rumours, no matter how often he emphatically denies them.
Outsiders just can’t understand why so savvy a businessman with no natural ties to upper-coastal Florida (he emigrated from Pakistan to the U.S. Midwest in 1967) would keep a prized NFL team in one of the smallest, poorest markets — when he has the league’s first foothold in London.
I’m on record as saying I strongly doubt an NFL franchise can succeed based in London. How would the club lure its share of free agents and remain competitive? Or overcome the competitive disadvantage of all those cross-Atlantic flights? Let alone whether the NFL would ever conclude it’s logistically possible to locate a franchise in Europe.
I’m dubious. If Khan ever decides he really wants to relocate the Jaguars to one of the world’s largest English-speaking cities without an NFL franchise, he need look no further than the one that’s but an hour’s jet ride from the Big Apple, not seven: Toronto.