The NFL's ratings crisis

Don't care about concussions. They can wear swords for all I care.

I do care that if I flip to an NFL game, there is a 64 percent chance it will be in commercial.

I do care that there is little sense of importance to any game. "We're at Week 16, and 26 of the 32 teams still remain in contention for a playoff spot!" Never mind that 20 of these 26 teams do not have elite QBs and therefore have zero chance of actually winning a Super Bowl.

 

When have they ever?

 

Trial balloon floats via PFT on ending Thursday games.

League will take a close look at Thursday Night Football

Only the owners' short-sighted greed would prevent this move, but short-sighted greed is the most common and powerful characteristic of owners.

 

Leitch got a pretty good column out of appearing on Fox News to talk about the NFL ratings stuff.

For the last time: Kaepernick isn't why NFL TV ratings went down.

 

Thanks for posting that, Luggie. Perhaps I have been too dismissive of this problem. I absolutely get the idea of parents steering their children away from football, having that lead to a diminished talent pool and eventually hurting the professional game. What I think I underestimated is people simply turning away because what they are so disturbed by what hear about the impact of head injuries.

Perhaps it because it doesn't surprise me. Not just from personal experience, but the stories caught my attention years ago. Specifically, it was Merril Hoge, a favorite player of mine when he was with the Steelers. Hoge suffered a near-fatal brain injury in 1994, when he was playing for the Bears. Hoge returned to play five weeks after a concussion and he wasn't fully healed. A blow to the head sent him to the locker room, where he flatlined. Doctors were able to resuscitate him, but he suffered serious cognitive issues for weeks. I remember reading about him being unable to recognize his wife and child and having to relearn how to read.

I was always surprised how little attention Hoge's story got at the time. The guy nearly died as a direct result of the game and few people seemed to care. These crippling brain injuries aren't new. All that has changed is the public becoming more aware of the problem.

 

Confirms what I thought all along: Kaep is just an excuse for the Facebook conservatives to rally around. As has been noted, the anthems are rarely televised nowadays. And per 506sports.com, SF-Miami was only shown in Northern California, Reno and South Florida.

 

Point taken, but it seems the anthem is usually shown this season, owing in large part to Kaepernick.

(As an aside, the Naval officer, who had the awesome military name of Generald and sang tonight's anthem, was fantastic.)

 

I admit to being a bit busy on Sundays, so haven't watched games from the start, so relied on past seasons.

 

SI story about the changing style of NFL consumption and TV ratings.

Inside the frenetic way we consume football

 

In the early 90s, SI did a cover story about how it expected sports on TV to be delivered in the 21st century. It was a little outlandish, but I've tried, without success to determine how close they actually got.

 

NFL TV viewership declines 8 percent from '15

Prime-time broadcasts were the most affected. ESPN's Monday Night Football (17 games) and NBC's Sunday Night Football (19 games, including two Thursdays), the two most costly rights deals, were down 12 and 10 percent, respectively, in total viewers.

The weekly Cowboyfest at the end of the season undoubtedly rescued numbers that could have been even worse.

I don't know if that's in a range that the NFL can say it was cyclical or a down year, but this seems like a substantial and possibly unrecoverable shift.

 

I think the NFL needs a couple of new semi-dynasties to emerge to challenge or supplant the Patriots, especially with their only real nemesis, Peyton Manning, retired. (The Giants aren't consistently good enough, despite the two victories over them in Super Bowls.)

Other than the Peyton Mannings, it's been the Patriots and a revolving cast of largely anonymous teams rising and falling for the past two decades.