NFL FANS NOT TUNING IN TO LOUSY GAMES
Only one reason TV ratings in decline, and it’s the quality of the product
At the start of the fourth quarter of the NFL’s Monday night game, Houston’s Brock Osweiler performed a one-man play titled “The Problem with the National Football League in 2016.”
OK, not really. What Osweiler did was drop back to pass, cock his right arm and somehow drop the ball just as he was about to bring it forward. The resulting 10-yard heave to no one in particular looked like an incomplete pass, but was ruled a fumble because Osweiler lost control of the ball before he threw it.
It was a play of such rare ineptness that no one on either side of the ball grasped what had happened, with everyone just assuming the ball was dead, even Denver cornerback Chris Harris, who collected it on a bounce and had a clear path to the end zone. Their confusion was understandable: who drops a ball, untouched, and also manages to throw it 10 yards?
But the Osweiler play was also a neat encapsulation of this wet firecracker of an NFL season, where key television ratings have dropped significantly and the previously invulnerable shield is showing a few cracks. Many theories have been offered for the decline, but Osweiler’s botching of a routine play underscores the most accurate explanation: the NFL is providing a lousy product.
Other reasons have been offered. The presidential election has stolen some audience, which is fair on nights when a debate was directly competing with an NFL game, and less relevant on nights with no live election event. One survey suggested people were less likely to watch NFL games because certain players were protesting racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. Those polls, to use a technical term, sound like codswallop: No one has ever watched a football game for the anthem, unless they have wagered on its length in the Super Bowl. There is a theory that concerns over concussions are finally having a tangible impact, but nothing has happened in the past six months to make that issue any more top of mind than it was three seasons ago, when ratings were still booming. And none of those arguments explain why the NFL’s ratings on Sundays are stagnant, but have declined precipitously in prime-time hours — doubledigit percentage drops on Thursdays, Sunday nights and Mondays. People who would not mind watching men be concussed at 4 p.m. would not suddenly have a problem with it at 8:30.
No, it’s a simpler explanation, and one that can be seen by looking at the NFL’s prime-time schedule through seven weeks. Of the 22 games that were televised in standalone slots, I count five that were compelling matchups, and that generously includes Sunday night’s Seattle-Arizona slog, a game that finished 6-6 after overtime. I looked the game up on the NFL’s website just now, and the highlight loop was, honestly: holding penalty, incomplete pass, holding penalty, incomplete pass. Feel the excitement!
In some cases, the appeal of a game was hurt by missing stars — Tom Brady, Cam Newton and Tony Romo have all been out for prime-time games — but in many more, one or both of the teams were just objectively bad. The Chicago Bears have been on prime time three times already this season. The Chicago Bears are awful. Houston has had three prime-time games and their two best players are J.J. Watt (out for the year) and DeAndre Hopkins (receiver for ... quarterback who drops the ball for no good reason).
One can’t entirely blame the NFL’s schedulers for picking so many prime-time lemons, since there is a such a dearth of great teams. New England, with Brady back from exile, is one. Then, um, Dallas? Minnesota and Denver, maybe, although they are presently led by Sam Bradford and Trevor Siemian (note: actual person). With so many mediocre to bad teams, it’s inevitable that at least one of a given week’s primetime offerings will include a dud.
For the NFL, this is a serious problem, because for years it has built itself into the league of interchangeable parts. The salary cap, and the parity it forced, meant teams were always dropping players, even stars, and picking up replacements on the cheap. Other than the handful of players who were faces of the game, the key selling point was the event itself, that you could tune in to whatever game happened to be on and find a reason to stick around. Now, the games are much less attractive and the next generation of stars after Peyton Manning and Brady is hard to identify. There’s something cultural going on here, too. Attention spans are shorter and there are many other distractions competing with a three-hour game. But this would be much less of a problem for the NFL if the games were, you know, good. The viewership numbers suggest that people are still watching NFL games, but for less time.
The Week 7 prime-time games were a Green Bay blowout of the Bears, the Arizona-Seattle tie and Denver’s dismantling of tall, incompetent Osweiler.
You can’t blame America for finding something better to do.