Sunday Night Football ratings dip for NBC
STAMFORD — Millions of Americans are spending more time at home than ever as a result of the coronavirus crisis. But their homebound schedules have hardly translated into a ratings bonanza for NBC Sports’ flagship show.
One month into the 2020 NFL season, Stamford-based NBC Sports’ Sunday Night Football remains the No.1 primetime TV program, but it has drawn noticeably fewer viewers in recent weeks. The audience dip is likely the product of a number of factors including increased competition from other leagues’ rescheduled events, news coverage in a presidential-election year and shifting viewer habits.
“COVID-19 has done quite a number of all of professional sports, initially with mass shutdowns and now with many leagues shifting into unfamiliar seasons or playing abbreviated seasons or playoffs,” said Josh Shuart, director of sports management at Sacred Heart University’s Jack Welch College of Business & Technology. “Even the NFL is not immune to decreased viewership, although it’s still significantly higher than all other leagues.”
NBC Sports declined to comment for this article.
Early-season challenges
With its first two SNF games of the season — the Sept. 10 opener featuring the defending Super Bowl champions Kansas City Chiefs’ victory against the Houston Texans and the Los Angeles Rams’ win over the Dallas Cowboys on Sept. 13 — NBC averaged 20.5 million viewers. For the 2019 season, SNF also averaged 20.5 million.
But the viewership has dipped in the past four weeks.
On Sunday, 15.6 million watched the Seattle Seahawks grind out a 27-26 decision against the Minnesota Vikings. The same number watched the San Francisco 49ers beat the Philadelphia Eagles on Oct. 4.
The Seahawks’ win against the New England Patriots on Sept. 17 and the Green Bay Packers’ defeat of the New Orleans Saints a week later both brought in 18.5 million viewers.
As a result of the coronavirus crisis, SNF has faced increased competition this
The difference in stock-ownership rates is one reason the typical white, non-Hispanic household had a net worth of $189,100 in 2019, versus $24,100 for the median Black household, according to the Fed survey. That gap of nearly eight times compares with a little more than six times at the start of the millennium.
“Especially if you talk about working for 30 to 40 years and steadily contributing to a retirement account and not taking it out when you change jobs or borrowing against it, you would come out way ahead” with a portfolio that has stocks in addition to lowerrisk investments, said Sherman Hanna, a professor at Ohio State University who does research on financial planning. He calls it “the easy route to accumulating at least some amount of wealth.”
Among middle-aged families, which are the most likely to have a retirement account, 65 percent of white families have a 401(k), individual retirement account or another similar plan, according to the Fed. The figure is just 44 percent for Black families and 28 percent for Hispanic families.
Researchers have found that Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to have employers that offer a 401(k).
Kashif A. Ahmed, president of American Private Wealth, a financial planning firm in Bedford, Mass., remembers giving a talk at a Black church about the higher long-term returns that stocks have historically provided.
“One person sitting in the audience said, ‘That’s all fine and wonderful, but this is all for white folks,’ ” he said.
Malcolm Ethridge, a financial adviser in the Washington area, regularly sees a reluctance to invest in stocks among Black people with enough money to do so, such as tech executives, attorneys and people who inherited rental properties.
“My personal opinion is Black Americans tend not to trust things that are not tangible because of our history in this country and things being taken away,” Ethridge said. “It gets passed on to you from generation to generation: to only trust and believe in things you can actually touch.”
“A house, I can put my hands on that and believe in that, whereas a stock is just whatever someone else tells me it’s worth, and I just have to take your word for it.”
Bob Marshall, a banking executive in northern Virginia who is Black and does invest in stocks, said differences in financial literacy education may be one factor in the racial disparity in stock ownership rates. Or, he said, because fewer Black families have wealth that has carried through generations, they may be more wary of risky investments.
“I’m building wealth for my children and grandchildren, so I’m going to hold onto more of it and be risk-averse,” he said is a common theme. Building and keeping that wealth “is more important from a legacy perspective than me maybe amassing 20 or 30 percent more.”
Marshall also recalled that he didn’t have much exposure to stocks while growing up. His parents didn’t talk much about them because they were seen as too risky. He started dabbling in the market after taking a class in college where they tracked stocks.
Rogers, who founded Ariel Investments in 1983, said Marshall’s experience has been common among Black people for generations.
“There isn’t a passing down of knowledge from generation to generation,” he said. “It’s the opposite of what I hear from Warren
Buffett about the magic of compound interest and how much wealth has been created since he was born. Those kinds of stories don’t happen in Black communities.”
Rogers had a different experience because of a conversation his father had with a friend, a white lawyer, about why African Americans didn’t invest in stocks. The friend said that he had already given his 10-year-old son some understanding of the market and that Rogers’ father should do the same for him.
His dad introduced him to a Black stockbroker in Chicago, one who became a role model to Rogers, showing that Black people work in finance, too.
Ariel now manages $12 billion in assets.
Decades later, though, Black people are still relatively rare in the financial industry. It’s a difficult trend to break, Rogers said, as white people who grew up in wealthier neighborhoods have an easier time building up business and are the ones more often getting promotions.
With relatively few Black people running big financial companies or offering their services as financial planners, potential Black investors may feel that buying stocks is not for them.
There are only about 1,200 Black certified financial planners in the U.S., said Ethridge, the financial adviser in the Washington area who is also on the board of the Association of African American Financial Advisors. Across the country, there are more than 87,000 certified financial planners in all.
Still, financial advisers say they are seeing a greater interest in stocks among younger Black clients. More of those Buffett-like conversations may be happening around dinner tables.
Gary Simms Sr., a global information security strategist in Manassas, Virginia, began investing in stocks a couple decades ago after a friend pushed him to do better with his money. He was reluctant at first.
Some family members still warn him that he will lose his money. But he talks often about investing with his son, a teenager who already has his own stock portfolio. And when Simms buys gifts for high school graduations, it’s often shares of stock, along with the certificates of ownership.
“Culturally, I think African Americans are not raised to build equity,” he said, “but I do think the tide is turning.”