To End Ratings Slide NFL Suggests CANCELING Games

To End Ratings Slide NFL Suggests CANCELING Games

The NFL forgot WEAR A CUP!

The product has been going downhill, as Roger Goodell decided to all political correctness to take over. The more money the league paid its players the more they want, and the less they produce.

Player take the union approach to their jobs, and look for ways to pad the stats for optimum money and least fan enjoyment. Like most American businesses, the NFL forgot about the product, and focused on appeasing the social justice warriors.

Well it didn’t work for retail, and it doesn’t work for entertainment. Eventually the public decides to move on. And that’s appears to be happening now.

According to Breitbart, Thursday Night TV has taken a serious blow.

Network executives are scrambling to solve the growing problem of crashing ratings for the National Football League, by cutting games to end the perceived “over-saturation” of football on TV.

To put an end to the sliding ratings, the executives are proposing that fewer games may be the ticket to stop that “over-saturation,” with one idea being to cut Thursday Night Football by a whopping ten games.

The idea to trim Thursday Night Football from 18 games a season to only eight was first reported by Sports Business Journal and was part of a plan to reverse the ratings crash that also includes pulling games played in the U.K. back to 1 PM eastern time (6PM London time).

Indeed the amount of football on TV has exploded in the last decade.

“Ten years ago, the NFL had 32 game windows through week six,” SBJ reported. “This year, it is up to 39, a 22 percent increase. It’s even more crowded in college, where the 2007 windows to this point added up to 105. This year, it’s at 179, up a whopping 71 percent.”

While availability may be part of the problem, that’s not the entire problem.

As recent events suggest, the biggest problem with the league is the Kaepernick Effect.

Ratings clearly began a downward spiral after Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem.

Sports Illustrated reported on an internal CBS study around the Kaepernick Effect:

CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said research his network did internally indicated that the protests played some kind of role in declining average viewers. He was emphatic, however, that it was merely a factor and not the cause. The average television viewership for the 2016 NFL season dropped roughly 8% last year from 2015.

“We did research and it was relatively proprietary research, to be honest with you,” McManus said. “But I think if you look at some of the reasons why NFL viewership was down last year, that is a reason that’s mentioned by a fair amount of viewers. It is something they don’t find attractive or they find don’t compelling in coverage of the football game. How big a factor it was? I don’t really know. But it was one of the factors that I think perhaps led to the slight decrease in ratings last year.”

ESPN Business reporter Darren Rovell uses “trends” over the past 4 years to try to make his point.

Week 3 was one of the best weeks for the NFL, though it wasn’t good. By week 7 however, the writing was on the wall.

Nevertheless, the Leftwing rag The Atlantic continued the narrative of the steady decline.

That said, the general trend is down in almost every window for the last four years. Last year, the NFL’s decline accelerated due to an uptick in cord-cutting, a blockbuster presidential election, and a raft of non-competitive games.

I’ve heard that song before, “non-competitive games”, as well as a host of other excuses.

While the league ratings have indeed trended downward over the past 4 years, 2017 will see the biggest drop pro rata by the end of the season. And based on the NFL’s response to players still kneeling, the ratings slide will continue.

The major networks are either completely quiet or somewhat subdued in their acknowledgement of the Kaepernick Effect. But they all know that kneeling by the NFL players put a serious dent in their viewership and incomes.

Will the NFL cancel some games? Likely.

The Breitbart article continues,

Mike Mulvihill, a Fox Sports vice president, told SBJ that the problem isn’t that there is too much NFL on TV, but that there is too much football all the way around — including college.

“The rise in football availability is pretty dramatic,” Mulvihill said. “This is what drives fragmentation in every area of television. … You can argue whether there’s greater or lesser interest in the game of football than there was ten years ago. But clearly, whatever that interest is, it’s being spread out over quite a few more windows than it was ten years ago.”

If the NFL were to cut the season back to 12 games canceled Thursday Night Football, it won’t matter. The ratings will fall until they acknowledge what the fans have demanded. An apology.

And the longer the NFL resists, the worse it will get. Once people figure out they can live without football, the league is doomed.

 

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