Massive TV deals prove business still booming for NFL money machine

Looking back, it's hard to believe the league saw Kaepernick kneeling as a viable threat

It has been almost five years since Colin Kaepernick started to kneel during the playing of the U.S. national anthem.

Which means it has also been almost five years since critics started insisting that, by tolerating such protests by Kaepernick and other players who followed his lead, the NFL was leading its business straight into the toilet. It was a big front in the culture wars, with former U.S. president Donald Trump being the most prominent voice to frequently claim the NFL was doomed if it allowed such behaviour to go unchecked. His media supporters echoed the argument, as did very many of his regular supporters.

Whenever I have written about Kaepernick or any other athletes giving voice to social justice issues, I will reliably hear from readers who insist that they have stopped watching this or that sport because they just can't tolerate these political views leaking into their sports watching.

This has always been so much nonsense, even if it does offer the pleasing visual of a would-be football fan sitting alone in his den on Sunday afternoon, his arms crossed in front of a blank TV screen, just refusing to turn it on so he can own the libs.

This week came the proof of just how ridiculous those arguments about the NFL'S imperilled business were. The league re-upped its broadcast deals with all of its usual partners, CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN, plus added a streaming deal with Amazon Prime. Reports suggest it will essentially double its broadcast revenue when the new contracts kick in for the 2023 season, going from about US$5 billion a year to US$10 billion per season. Some perspective: The National Hockey League hasn't finished its next TV deals, but it has packaged half of its U.S. rights to ESPN for about $400 million a season.

It turns out that, while Kaepernick did end up costing himself his NFL career in becoming the face of protests against racial injustice, he and his fellow kneelers didn't hurt the league's core business one bit. It was a tremendously wealthy enterprise before the foofaraw began five years ago, and it's much more of a wealthy enterprise now.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the NFL'S actual business, even as its loudest critics were complaining that it was torpedoing itself. Some of its prime-time ratings have dipped in recent years relative to historical benchmarks, but those reductions have only ever reflected broader — and, in many cases, steeper — declines across all kinds of television programming. NFL programming dominates the ratings whenever and wherever it airs in the U.S. Its games accounted for fully three-quarters of the top 100 single broadcasts in that country in 2020.

And as football writer Peter King noted, 27 regular-season NFL games, and almost every playoff game, had higher TV ratings than the recent Oprah interview with the reluctant royals Harry and Meghan — an event that was discussed afterward as a rare collective viewing experience that just doesn't happen anymore. A shocking audience for a sit-down interview with the Sussexes is a routine day for the monster that is the NFL.

With these deals, the NFL doesn't just make itself scads of money; it has, at least for a time, postponed the long-rumoured death of network television all by itself. The forces lining up against traditional TV aren't going away — streaming services, changing viewing habits, a younger generation that has never had a cable bill — but the big broadcasters are throwing so much money at the NFL precisely because it's the programming that keeps many millions of viewers from dropping their cable package entirely. And none of the big networks wanted to be left outside of the NFL tent, because its games are a huge platform for the rest of the network lineup, which is obvious when you have heard endless promos for The Masked Singer on a random Sunday.

In retrospect, the fascinating thing about the anthem controversy is how, for a time, the NFL leadership seemed genuinely worried that its business might have been in trouble. Various teams wrestled with how to deal with anthem kneelers, leading to scenes in which some players knelt together while others stood next to them but put a hand on their shoulders. Jerry Jones infamously led his Dallas Cowboys in a group kneel before the national anthem on a Monday night.

Kaepernick, meanwhile, was radioactive, never taking the field again after the 2016 season, never even getting through the doors of a team facility while various grizzled vets and young who-dats and Nathan Peterman filled out the quarterback slots on countless NFL rosters over the years. The whole thing was best encapsulated by Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, who admitted in 2017 that they were thinking about signing Kaepernick but were frightened of where it might lead.

Time passes, though. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell last year acknowledged the league should have handled the anthem situation differently and offered an apology to Kaepernick. The league, like many others, tried to give social justice issues more of a game-day presence.

And business is booming like never before. Whatever were they worried about?