NFL RATINGS TAKE HIT, BUT DON’T BLAME ANTHEM DISPUTE
TV viewership already was declining before President Trump’s comments
Here’s another strategy for morning-after quarterbacks to ponder: Are NFL players’ kneeling protests hurting TV ratings and even, perhaps, driving down TV stocks?
The answer is likely to be as hotly contested as an NFL line of scrimmage. NFL ratings are down for the just-started season, just as they were last season, and stocks of the major networks that broadcast NFL games are trending down, too.
But ratings for a variety of sports broadcasts have seen declines with NASCAR and the NBA also drawing fewer TV viewers — likely influenced by huge shifts in the way fans watch sports and by other factors that may have drawn their attention away, from hurricanes to last year’s dramapacked presidential election.
And fans may have tuned out well before President Trump’s exhortation last weekend to boycott games if players kneel, with these early abstainers acting out of sympathy with Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who says he used the spotlight to protest racial bias in the judicial system. Others may have backed away because they disagreed with Kaepernick. And still others may have dropped the NFL for a totally separate reason: mounting evidence that many players have suffered severe brain disease.
What’s not disputed is that NFL ratings were down about 10% for the first three weeks of the season, with about 15.8 million viewers (watching live or on DVR same-day), compared to 17.6 million during the first three weeks of 2016, according to Nielsen data. That follows a trend last year of overall viewership during the 2016 regular season, when ratings fell 8%.
And this past week, NFL viewership fell, on average, 4% from the prior week (not counting ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcast), Nielsen data shows.
As the beginning of the NFL season has played out, stocks of networks that broadcast games and deliver pay-TV programming have taken hits, too. The overall market is up 2% in that time.
President Trump’s comments Friday that owners should fire or suspend players who protest, followed by tweets that called on fans to act, has sparked broader protests. Many more NFL players kneeled as the national anthem was played at Sunday games.
One problem with making a direct, causal link between NFL ratings and protests: The firestorm of controversy in the past few days doesn’t explain the down drift of ratings during the season’s first two weeks, when any kneeling protest drew little attention, said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, a research firm that tracks media and entertainment.
A second data point that’s clear: TV watching of all stripes, not just sports, is losing its hold over the American viewer. Fewer U.S. homes, 79%, are getting payTV service, down from 84% in 2014, Leichtman says. “Over the past 20 years, there’s been a proliferation in channels,” he said.
The NFL attempted to schedule more desirable prime-time matchups to stoke viewing this season, but that hasn’t played out.
“Despite that proactive attempt, this season also seems to be off to a weaker-than-expected start in terms of the overall ratings,” said Tuna Amobi, an equity analyst at investment research firm CFRA.
But about connecting Trump’s comments to viewing declines, “I would be hard-pressed to draw that correlation,” he said.
Hurricanes hitting the mainland — and subsequent recovery efforts — likely had an effect on viewership during the first two weeks with scores of Americans without electricity or too focused on the storms’ aftermath to watch sports. Last year, politics played a part in lower ratings, according to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who attributed some of the decline to the presidential election.
Anecdotal evidence suggests some Trump supporters punted the NFL after Kaepernick began his protest against the oppression of people of color by sitting and later kneeling during the anthem, says Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group.
“But at the same time is it also possible that maybe these people were in areas where football is played more and there’s actually more concern around head injuries ... or was that audience most distracted by election activity?”
Stocks of TV companies broadcasting NFL games have been on a losing streak recently, but the NFL alone isn’t to blame, Wieser says. “The sector has a lot of negative factors weighing on it,” including a weak advertising market, declining pay-TV subscribers and the move to create their own direct-to-consumer streaming services, he said.
CBS has seen its shares drop
9% over the past month to close at $58 Tuesday. Disney, which owns ESPN, has fallen about 4% to $98.63; Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, is down about 6% to $37.81; and Fox is down 2% to
$26.42. Also down: AT&T, which owns DirecTV and offers its NFL Sunday Ticket package, off 2% to
$38.72.
Individually, networks had aspects to cheer about over the latest ratings. CBS said viewership of its Week 3 games rose 4% over last year. NBC’s Sunday Night Football won its prime-time slot with 17.6 million viewers, peaking with 19.4 million during the second quarter. ESPN reported a
71% hike in viewership for its Monday night game between the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals, based on early Nielsen data from specific markets.
The NFL will continue to attract bidders — the networks, DirecTV and others including Amazon, which will broadcast 10 Thursday Night Football games this year starting this week, paid about $7 billion for rights.
However, there is “unquestionably an overhang to be addressed, given the way the season has started in terms of the ratings,” Amobi said.