TV ratings falling across most sports
Confluence of events have taken place in pandemic
When we were smack in the middle of the barren sports landscape of April and May, it seemed natural to assume that the hunger to watch big events would build to a crescendo when they finally came back.
With no options other than classic games or documentaries, the only salvation was the promise of a fall cornucopia to give us our sports fix and then some.
But the idea that sports coming back would automatically bring fans to their televisions in huge numbers has turned out to be inaccurate.
In fact, it would be completely fair to say that the viewership for sports has been a bit disappointing.
There are lots of theories about why
that has been the case. But the one that makes the most sense?
It turns out, there might be *too much* sports to watch. And when you combine that with the basic lifestyle changes so many people have made during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is both an explanation for the drop in numbers and somewhat of a longterm warning for sports coming out of a crisis that has upended all of our routines.
“Everyone is excited in the spring like, ‘ Oh, we’ll have this incredible fall with so much sports to watch,’ ” said Austin Karp, the managing editor/digital at Sports Business Journal who closely tracks ratings and the sports television industry.
“But the problem is there is that tonnage. That’s why we spread this out over the course of the year. People are inundated with, ‘OK, I have football, do I really need to watch the NBA Finals? My mind is trained to watch that in June.”
Let’s make one thing clear: The average fan should not care how many people are watching a particular game or sport. If you enjoy it, you should watch it. What difference does it make if others are tuned in? Generally speaking, television ratings are a niche topic that only matter inside the industry, and yet the coverage they receive in the media often leads people to seize on them to further a particular narrative.
The most prominent example of that, of course, began in 2016 when rightwing political commentators tried to correlate Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality and racial inequality during the national anthem with a drop in NFL ratings as a way to validate their criticism of him personally.
The same pattern has been repeated during the NBA’s restart with players highlighting social justice messages and the league’s embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, ratings for the bubble have been lackluster overall and viewership of the Finals thus far has been historically poor, with Game 1 registering 7.41 million viewers (lowest on record) and sinking to 5.94 million for Game 3.
But the theory that fans are turned off by “wokeness” doesn’t hold up when you consider the following:
h Ratings for the Stanley Cup Final were down 61% from last year, averaging 2.15 million viewers.
h The final round of the U.S. Open golf tournament had 3.21 million viewers, by far the fewest going back more than 30 years.
h The U.S. Open tennis tournament viewership fell sharply on ESPN, down 45% from the year before. The French Open is down 57% so far on NBC.
h The Kentucky Derby, which normally gets around 15 million viewers, only had 9.3 million at its rescheduled slot in September.
h Even the NFL, which has had some bright spots in the ratings thus far and seems to be holding steady, has had trouble getting viewers in certain windows like Thursday night, which has recorded consecutive lows for prime-time games.
In other words, the pattern is clear. And it should lead us to examine what’s really going on.
There are four pretty obvious factors contributing to that.
1 There’s a certain level of cannibalization on the calendar. As an example, Game 1 of the Rays-Yankees series had 2.33 million viewers on TBS, which was one-third less than a similar time slot on TBS from the division series. But it was also going up against NFL games, which likely chipped away viewers from both sides.
2 It’s not part of our natural cycle to be watching sports on weekday afternoons or NBA Finals games in October or Triple Crown races on a college football Saturday. “We get used to watching certain things or having particular sports be part of our lives at certain times of the year,” said Dennis Deninger, a former ESPN production executive who is now a professor in sports communications at Syracuse University’s Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. “One of my contentions is the Super Bowl is perfectly placed in February when most people are indoors. If the placement of the Super Bowl had to be moved to the summer, it would definitely have lower ratings because there’s more things competing against it. If you move sports from their natural positions to places that they’re unfamiliar, they’re competing with sports that are traditionally seen in those time periods and everyone suffers a little bit.”
3 Lack of fans in the stands is a psychological cue that these games don’t mean as much. “The crowd going crazy is part of the allure of watching sports on TV,” Karp said. “Crowd goes wild is an expression for a reason.”
4 There’s a presidential election going on in a highly charged political climate, which echoes some of the data Karp saw from 2016 when some news and commentary shows were up 30%. “Viewership in cable news networks is up significantly, and right now, especially once the president got COVID, that’s all anyone was watching,” Karp said. “It affected college football numbers (last weekend). It affected everything.”
But there’s also an existential question that nobody really knows the answer to. Has the pandemic changed people’s behaviors and habits in a way that will be difficult for sports to recover from when life goes back to normal?
For millions of Americans, the routine of going to work, coming home, eating dinner and settling in on the couch to watch a game has not been part of their lives for seven months. They’ve been working from home, schooling their children at home, developing new hobbies to occupy their downtime and watching television when it fits their schedule.
“This familiar, linear nature of our lives has been interrupted,” Deninger said. “In the first six months of 2020, Netflix added 5.2 million new homes subscribing in the United States and brought their total to almost 73 million. They don’t have any sports. Regardless of how your schedule has been upended, you can watch what you want when you want and escape into fiction.
“The cable services that have been delivering the prime delivery platforms for sports in the United States are now reaching only 51.1 million homes, that’s the entire cable universe. If you add direct broadcast satellite, you get another 23 million.
“For Amazon Prime and Netflix to both be larger than the entire cable industry in the U.S. is remarkable.”
The cable television industry getting smaller and the number of so-called cord cutters getting larger is not a new story, but it’s one that has certainly been magnified by the pandemic. Whether those people come back to watching sports once this is all over and the calendar normalizes is difficult to project, but it will have major implications on rights negotiations in the future, which directly impacts league revenue and player salaries.
In that sense, Karp said the industry is viewing 2020 as a one-off and that the ratings for anything should not be compared to 2019. Likewise, 2021 should not be compared to 2020. In the end, the demand for live sports is still going to win out, even if some people have shifted to “Tiger King” for the time being.
“I’m almost giving a pass to everything going on right now,” he said. “I think people that are helping negotiate those deals are smart enough to know we just need to get games on TV right now and ratings be damned.
“The head NFL media executive sent a memo to teams saying don’t worry about the ratings, they are what they are, just stay safe. That’s paramount right now.
“When rights deals come up, the NFL and NBA are still going to get an increase. When you look at the top 100 programs, it’s all football, Olympics, World Series games, the Derby. There’s no ‘Big Bang Theory’ anymore that is going to crack that. ‘ Cheers’ isn’t coming back. Those are shifted to Netflix or Amazon or one of the 10,000 things launching now.”