Still No. 1, NFL ratings feeling the pressure
NBC Sports adapts to changing viewing habits
NBC Sports Group’s flagship NFL show still rules American television, even as the Stamford-based company faces growing challenges in maintaining that reign.
“Sunday Night Football” finished the television season last week as the No.1 prime-time TV show for a record seventh straight year, breaking a tie with “American Idol” for the most consecutive years on top of the charts. But the program has seen its audience significantly decline in the past two years, and it is unclear whether recent changes, such as a new NFL policy on national anthem protests, will stop that slide.
“As part of the strongest prime-time lineup in TV, this milestone is a testament to the hundreds of hard-working members of the “Sunday Night Football” team, who are devoted to putting on a superb show each week,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Broadcasting & Sports, said in a statement.
Dominant, but declining
“Sunday Night Football” averaged 18.2 million TV viewers in the 2017-18 season, comprehensively beating the second-mostwatched prime-time show, “CBS Thursday Night Football,” which averaged around 14 million. Digital platforms added an average of about 200,000 viewers for SNF.
SNF accounted for eight of the 10-most watched prime-time telecasts between Sept. 7 and Dec. 25, compared with an equivalent of seven in 2016.
The program also ranked as the No. 1 show in the 18-49 age demographic for the eighth consecutive season.
But viewership dropped about 10 percent from the 20.3 million TV average in the 2016 regular season. The audience had decreased at a similar rate between the 2016 and 2015 campaigns.
“While SNF continues to rack up enough ratings from an aging audience that largely takes its sports from traditional media, the new audience isn’t replacing that older audience, and I think the NFL should take this as a more ominous sign than they do,” Daniel Durbin, director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the University of Southern California, said in an email. “Winning the network TV ratings war is not the same in 2018 as it was in, say, 1998.”
This year’s Super Bowl, which was carried by NBC Sports, also experienced a drop-off. An average of approximately 103 million people watched the Philadelphia Eagles’ 41-33 victory over the New England Patriots. The viewership represented the smallest title game audience since Super Bowl XLIII in 2009.
NBC Sports officials say they are adapting to digital disruption, pointing to the online viewing records set by “Sunday Night Football” in the past season. About 6.9 million unique users consumed 689 million live-streaming minutes across
NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app and Verizon’s NFL Mobile service.
New rules
The NFL announced last week a new policy that prohibits on-field protests during the national anthem, but it lets players stay in their locker rooms during the ceremony.
Teams would be fined if players or other team personnel sit or kneel during the anthem. Dozens of players have participated in such protests in the past two seasons, saying they have done so to demonstrate against police brutality and other racial injustices.
NBC Sports officials said they did not have an official position on the new policy. But in a recent interview, Lazarus cited the protests as a factor in the audience decrease.
“I think there were people who said ‘I’m not going to support this,’ ” he said. “It’s anecdotal, but if you look at the ratings across the entirety of the country, the biggest markets, which you might argue are more open to change and different ideas, the coasts didn’t drop off nearly as much as the smaller markets in Middle America.”
Durbin expects the NFL’s ratings decline to continue, barring the emergence of a particularly compelling storyline.
“In the long run, the NFL’s rather half-hearted — and late in the day — attempt to look patriotic isn’t going to fix their larger problems with a changing media landscape and an incredibly slow lead-footedness about changing to meet that landscape,” Durbin said. “I don’t think making players stand up for the anthem is likely to help a whale of a lot.”