Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
The 2023 National Football League regular season ended last Sunday. For yet another year, the television ratings for the fall pro football league produced gargantuan numbers for its partners.
How good were the NFL’s television ratings? Am I still allowed to say, “Super”?
In 2023, the only television programs which attracted more than 20 million viewers were NFL football games.
Starting with the 115 million TV viewers for last February’s Super Bowl game, there were fourteen NFL football games which drew more than 20 million viewers last year.
The Oscars (#15 last year with 19 million) and an episode of Fox Television’s “Next Level Chef” (which followed the Super Bowl game) came in at #22 with 17 million viewers were the only non-NFL shows to crack the top 30 most-watched television programs last year.
Think about that. Twenty-eight of the top thirty television programs in 2023 were NFL football games.
Why is the NFL so popular?
In a nutshell, the NFL supplies a consistent entertainment product which continues to satisfy its customers. The reliable quality on the field of play brings back customers every week in the fall to watch more.
Sure, the growth of fantasy football, online wagering, keeping Sunday as its primary day of competition, and other factors haven’t hurt.
When you think about it, the NFL’s schedule and television format has changed very little over the past 50 years. If you tuned in to watch a game in the fall of 1973, you would have seen two Sunday afternoon football games. One game kicked-off at 12 Noon (Central) and the other around 3:00PM. By then, there was already a Monday Night Football Game (started in 1970).
In the 2023 football season, those same three time slots were still populated with NFL football games. That is the epitome of product consistency!
The NFL added a Sunday Night Football game in 2006. That game has been slowing growing its television ratings since inception, too.
NFL Thursday Night Football has done better than expected
The most recent big change to the NFL’s programming was the permanent addition of a weekly Thursday night football game. Believe it or not, ABC’s “Monday Night Football” experimented with the same idea. It aired a few of its games on Thursday nights from the late 1970’s into the 1980’s.
The football players have never liked the idea of playing on Thursday. After having played a game on the previous Sunday, players need sufficient time for their bodies to recover. As you might have expected, the NFL owners and the Players Union eventually reached an agreement to incorporate a weekly Thursday Night Football game into the schedule.
Money talks.
The NFL’s Thursday Night Football game has seen a variety of platforms (the NFL Network, CBS, and NBC to name a few) over the past 17 years. The league eventually sold its Thursday Night package to Amazon Prime subscribers ($8.99 to $14.99/monthly cost) a few years ago. Amazon Prime retains exclusive rights for this weekly game through 2033.
Surprisingly (at least to me), those games still reached more than 10 million viewers on most weeks of the 2023 football season.
Why haven’t the NBA, Major League Baseball, and others grown like the NFL?
Thus far, the NFL has been very smart to limit its regular season to about four months. From early September to early January, the 32-team league plays a 17-game schedule. The NFL playoffs take one additional month and end in early February.
By contrast, the 82-game NBA regular season stretches for seven months from October through April. Home television viewership for the basketball league suffers every fall when competing against the NFL and college football for interest. The NBA’s playoffs (which include more than half of the 30 teams) start in April and then drag on for another two months into mid-June. The champion and runner-up may play 100 or more basketball games over nine months.
The National Hockey League schedule mirrors the NBA. Keeping the attention span of the public from October through June is too much.
The professional basketball and hockey leagues seem to have forgotten that the majority of its fans still consider those to be indoor winter sports. Television viewers have yet to embrace those two sports in massive numbers (unlike the NCAA’s March Madness tournament which ends the college basketball season). The springtime finals of the college hoops tournament will draw millions more viewers than the mid-June playoff finales for either the NBA or NHL.
Major League Baseball has a long sporting tradition like the NFL. In 2024, baseball’s 162-game regular season begins on March 28 and will continue for six long months into late September. The MLB playoffs conclude one month later. By that time of year, baseball is in full combat with both the NFL and college football for television viewers.
Like the NBA and NHL, baseball’s television appeal would benefit by playing a shorter regular season. I would like for baseball season to be wrapped-up before the end of September.
Don’t feel sorry for those other professional sports, though. With so many television networks competing for viewers, the team owners and players of the non-football sports are doing quite well financially. Those leagues are more than willing to stretch their seasons for the incremental bucks.
The NFL is televising a playoff game this Saturday night – on Peacock?
On Saturday, January 12, NBC’s Peacock internet-based streaming service will be the only place where NFL fans can watch the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs host the Miami Dolphins.
Peacock’s owner (NBCUniversal) is trying to drive traffic to their less-than-wildly-popular online streaming service. Though some soccer and wrestling fans have been willing to pay the $5.99 monthly fee, Peacock has not been a big hit with most sports fans. Still, it had an estimated 28 million worldwide subscribers.
“We are thrilled to partner with the NFL on this industry milestone, bringing to Peacock the first ever exclusively live streamed NFL Playoff game,” said Pete Bevacqua of NBC Sports.
Last month on Saturday, December 23rd, Peacock hosted its first ever NFL regular season game. The ratings report said that about seven million people tuned into for the match-up between the playoff-seeking Buffalo Bills and the disappointing Los Angeles Chargers. Though seven million isn’t a travesty, it was less than half of the average viewing audience for NFL games shown on traditional TV outlets during that weekend.
This Saturday, Peacock gets a second opportunity to shine. It will be the exclusive home for the Wild Card match-up between the Chiefs and the Dolphins.
This time, Peacock has an ace up its online sleeve for this weekend’s game!
The Kansas City Chiefs have become the favorite football team for a worldwide legion of fans of pop music star Taylor Swift. The “Swifties” are enthralled that their 34-year old heartthrob has been dating Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce this fall. During every telecast of the Kansas City Chiefs in recent months, the cameras have conveniently shown Taylor Swift cheering for her new boyfriend from the front window of her expensive and quite secure box suite.
This very unique “Taylor Swift effect” has brought a few million new television fans to every Kansas City Chiefs telecast since the word spread about the budding relationship between Swift and Travis Kelce. (Don’t ask me why as I haven’t purchased any new music since the late 1980’s.)
If an average football fan (like me) is not willing to shell-out $5.99 to watch this Saturday’s first round playoff match-up, NBCUniversal believes that legions of mostly-female “Swifties” will.
We will learn the results of this experiment by early next week.
Let’s not forget about the millions of long-time football fans of the Chiefs and Dolphins who will gladly fork-over the $5.99 monthly fee to watch this game, too. It would not surprise me if Peacock draws more than 10 million viewers for Saturday night’s game in Kansas City (where the game time temperature is expected to be hovering near zero degrees).
My lovely sports wife added an interesting theory. During January, health club operators enroll large numbers of New Year’s resolution -motivated exercise clients. Within a matter of weeks, many people go back to their old habits and forget that they signed-up. Some will continue to pay the monthly health club fees out of guilt for several more months.
Peacock may be hoping that a “healthy” (get it?) percentage of NFL fans may forget about cancelling the monthly programming service before February arrives. Even if the vast majority of NFL fans remember to cancel their subscription, Peacock will still have more subscribers next month than they did prior to January 1, 2024. This might be a brilliant plan!
Does this mean that the NFL is quickly moving toward a pay TV model?
No way.
As discussed in this story, the NFL has been very smart and deliberate when it comes to implementing any significant changes to its television product offerings. Years and years will pass before America’s most watched television programming will purposefully shrink its own audience just for a few extra bucks.
The 32 NFL franchise owners want the value of their teams to continue to rise. They are quite pleased with their good fortune in recent years.
For the time being, the NFL is at the top of the mountain. Don’t expect any of its franchise owners to rock this boat in the foreseeable future.
As Mel Brooks once said, “It’s good to be the King!”