At a point of diminishing returns
Talent drain coupled with weak digital strategy are at the core of the league’s crisis
A mid-November TV ratings report delivered more bad news for the National Football League.
Viewership had dipped 5.7 per cent compared with the same point in 2016.
The season-long shrinkage of TV audiences perplexed league owners and frustrated sponsors. John Schnatter — the head of the Papa John’s pizza chain — said his own sales were slumping, and blamed NFL players who protested racism and police brutality by kneeling or raising their fists during the pregame national anthem.
At the intersection of sports, race and politics, competing groups scrambled to claim credit or assign blame for the NFL’s weak TV ratings. Conservative pundits who would prefer Black players stay silent on racism said activism alienated viewers. Meanwhile many supporters of free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began sitting out the anthem last pre-season, vowed they’d boycott the NFL until a team signed him.
In December, Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson added more fuel to the fire, when it was revealed the team had made several payouts for his workplace misconduct, including sexual harassment and using racial slurs. He subsequently said he’d sell the team.
But correlation doesn’t likely doesn’t equal causation here, and that’s even more troubling for the NFL. If anthem protests and other controversies vanished tomorrow, the league would still confront two factors dragging ratings down: Changing consumer habits and a diminished on-field product. More NFL games are on TV than at any point in the league’s history. Midseason games from England hit local airwaves at 9:30 a.m., meaning a dedicated fan could watch four complete games on a single Sunday. Add in Monday and Thursday games and a league that started as a once-a-week special event is now a near-everyday presence.
But as NFL broadcasts have proliferated, so have options for following games. Online streams, both legitimate and illegal, are improving both in speed and clarity, while anyone connected to Twitter or Google can always access scores, updates and highlights.
Those developments all enable hardcore NFL fans to connect to their teams from anywhere, and that’s part of the dilemma for the league and its broadcast partners. Fans now have several ways to follow games without watching on TV.
Smart leagues have figured out how to cash in on viewers’ new habits.
Major League Baseball’s digital media company, MLB Advanced Media, generates a reported $1.2 billion in revenue annually with the league’s 30 teams, which all invested in the venture, each receiving a return. In 2016 Disney paid a $1 billion for a 33 percent ownership stake in the firm.
The NFL, meanwhile, is still working toward a digital strategy that works. In the past, the league has streamed selected games on Yahoo and Twitter, and this season it sold Canadian rights for its Sunday Ticket package to the U.K.-based streaming service DAZN.
Immediately subscribers complained of feeds that streamed slowly or crashed completely. By midseason the NFL was forced to reach a new deal with cable providers to bring Sunday Ticket back to TV.
Still, the league has recognized the role streaming will play in the future of sports broadcasts and its trying to meet viewers where they’re most comfortable.
Solving the quality-of-product problem could prove much more difficult, and Thursday night games are acase in point. To the league they’re a valuable broadcast property, but to players they’re a hazard. They say the quick turnaround from a Sunday game diminishes performance and increases injury risk.
Two years ago Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman wrote an essay for The Players’ Tribune detailing his disgust with Thursday night games. This season Sherman tore an Achilles tendon during a Thursday night game, prompting teammate Doug Baldwin to suggest the league discontinue the games. Other players agree. “They suck. They throw a wrench in our schedule,” Buffalo Bills guard Richie Incognito told reporters in November. “It’s absolutely ridiculous that we have to do this. As physical as this game is, as much work and preparation that goes into this, to force us to play games in four-day weeks is completely unfair.”
The player backlash against Thursday night games may seem unrelated to Kaepernick’s continued inability to land an NFL gig, but both developments signal to consumers that the league and its teams are willing to peddle a diminished product. Knowingly. Thursday night games continue, even as injuries to stars like Sherman highlight their downside.
And proven NFL starter Kaepernick remains a free agent, even as teams sign journeyman quarterbacks such as Tom Savage, Josh Johnson and David Frales.
As stubborn as those issues might seem, the NFL and its teams could act decisively to address them. A schedule without Thursday games would result in better play, as would rosters that only contained NFL-calibre quarterbacks — of which Kaepernick is one.
But in the long term the NFL could face a much stiffer quality-of-play crisis.
The league can’t stop high schools from dropping the sport, driven by costs, concussion concerns and changing tastes. In September Chi- cago’s Whitney Young High School, which produced two-time Super Bowl champ Russell Maryland, canceled its football season when its varsity team ran short on players.
Nor can the NFL prevent multisport stars from specializing in less dangerous sports.
Aaron Judge caught 46 passes for 1,405 yards and 21 touchdowns as a tight end at Linden High School in California, but we now know him as the Yankees’ slugging right fielder. Likewise, Christian Coleman starred at cornerback for his high school in suburban Atlanta. Last winter ran the 40-yard dash under NFL Combine conditions and clocked 4.12 seconds, putting him .10 ahead of any NFL draft hopeful ever tested.
But by then Coleman was already deep into his track career at the University of Tennessee, and by summer he had turned pro and beaten Usain Bolt for world championship silver over 100 metres.
The more elite athletes decide not to enter the pipeline to the NFL, the bigger the league’s talent dilemma will become. If the NFL become a league for second-tier talent, it risks becoming a lesser option for viewers, too.
Then it won’t matter whether or not players stand for the anthem because fans will be watching something else.