I’m not a football fan, so I don’t know what may have changed about NFL games, but I’ve been seeing news articles about the decline. This article references a Rasmussen poll and claims that the protests are a large part of it. This Bloomberg report agrees, but also blames the increasing game lengths and too many referee calls.
So to the sport enthusiasts here, what say you? I sat down and watched a game last weekend as an uninterested observer, and here are the reason I wouldn’t watch again.
Too many commercials. Seriously. I wasn’t sure if I was watching a sporting event or a slow motion mugging by advertisers.
Too choppy. This is the same reason I stopped watching NASCAR. The constant interruptions by announcers to breathlessly tell me that player X was “guardedly optimistic” about the game and then drop some irrelevant factoid about their personal life. NASCAR got worse and worse about cutting from the race to show how a driver’s wife made corn fritters, that they lost me.
Playing too much with their graphical toys. Showing the line of scrimmage and a few other relevant yard markers is OK. The constant treatment of the finished plays as an Etch-a-Sketch with circles and arrows got a little old. NASCAR did the same thing before I abandoned them. They had little “thought bubbles” above each car with instantaneous info about speed, driver, lap counts etc. It distracted so much from the race that I finally turned off the set.
And yes, the protests. I tune in sports events as a respite from the world’s problems, not to be lectured and reminded of them.
So, what do you think are the reasons for the growing decline in NFL watchers? What would you recommend the NFL change to turn it around? According to the articles, it’s approaching 20% viewer loss this year.
Rising concerns among parents of football-related traumatic brain injuries could also play a role. My husband is a football fan, but despite that, he is in favor of steering our future kids from that sport. That will probably mean not watching a bunch of it on TV to prevent them from getting ideas.
Here are the reasons I listed in another NFL thread:
The nonstop parade of arrests in the off season.
Endless suspensions for either PEDs or marijuana
The deflating footballs story which dragged on longer than election season
Early morning London games and Thursday games all season long. Ever since I was in high school, I used to play some variety of pick 'em. Now I don’t, there’s just too many games and easy to forget one. Those early morning and Thursday games are also a pain in the butt for fantasy, especially when I’m still focused on baseball pennant runs and playoffs.
I have access to all sorts of European soccer, and I can’t spend the entire weekend watching sports especially in a year with very mild weather extending into late November.
I once planned “other things” so they wouldn’t interfere with Sunday (or Monday) football. Over the years, the balance shifted just enough that I’d rather be doing the “other things”.
There’s also the domestic violence issue. I don’t want to watch a football game and have to wonder, " which one of these guys is the one that just got arrested for beating up his wife?"
I’ve never been a superfan but I watch games here and there. I live in Packer country, but am a Bills fan, so whenever a Bills game is televised here I’ll watch. (Why do I do this?)
Anyway, for me, whenever I see the refs blow an obvious call (obvious to me at home, the people in the stands, the announcers on television) I turn the game off. This happens quite a bit. Then the next day the league doubles down on “The refs are fine and everything is great!” I haven’t bothered trying to watch a whole game since the Bills-Seahawks Monday Night Game, which I turned off at the end of the first half because of the absurd referee shitshow.
My take on it:
Competing media streams, including ability to watch online or even just get updates online.
Glut of football Where at one time you could see three games a week, now you could see as many as six (when game is in London). One of the reasons football has been successful is the relative rarity of its product (compared to baseball/basketball/hockey).
Whether it’s cyclical after an extended boom or the frightful long term injuries drive it, interest in general is cooling.
Frankly, I doubt that has much to do with it. People don’t really give a hoot about a backup quarterback kneeling during the anthem while watching a game involving two other teams.
If people are no longer watching games involving teams they were once veryemotionally invested in, I think one has to go a little deeper in analysis than “I don’t like black people protesting.” There’s something economic at work here.
Other ways of getting game updates/highlights besides sitting in front of the television for three hours
Better things to do
As a football fan who hasn’t really followed the season closely this year, “watching football” for me has usually consisted of getting together with a friend or two, pulling out some snacks and drinks, and chatting for three hours while occasionally looking up at the TV. But with the advent of Internet-based coverage, I don’t need to be stuck in front of a television screen for three hours. I can put something in the background and wait for the browser window to flash with a highlight, and then go putz around on the Internet. I can go out with friends and check my smartphone once in a while. If I’m wiling to wait 24 hours, I can pull up my subscription of NFL Gamepass and watch the condensed replay of a game in 30-45 minutes. So why would I ever want to be stuck in my living room for three hours waiting for something interesting to happen in the game?
Youth participation in football is declining at a rapid rate, people who grow up without footballs are not going to care all that much about it the rest of their lives.
My personal reasons, reposted from the Week 11 thread (these are probably in more-or-less descending order):
My team, the Packers, is coming apart at the seams, and the past month has not been fun to watch.
I think that the league, in general, has reached the point of oversaturation. Even if I don’t count the pre- and post-game shows, most weeks, it’s now possible to watch five games in their entirety (and, this upcoming week, with three games on Thanksgiving, one could watch seven games).
The concussion issue has increasingly given me pause about following a game which is so devastating to the health of so many of its players.
The rules and the officiating have become too much of a distraction. Between games which seem to have a penalty on every other play, seriously blown calls, and rules that have become so complex that the fans (or the officials!) can’t understand them (particularly the rules on what constitutes a catch), it takes away from the actual play of the game.
Overall, the quality of play in the NFL feels like it’s down. Now, this is absolutely a qualitative assessment, and it’s probably impossible to prove, but it feels like there are more missed tackles, more poor execution of pass routes, etc. My gut tells me that this goes back to the changes in this CBA regarding OTAs, and practice time during the season. Teams aren’t able to spend nearly as much time with their players during the offseason as they were before the current contract went into effect, and they’re able to spend less time in contact drills during the season. I suspect that this makes it harder for players to (a) learn the extremely complex systems that most NFL teams run (both on offense and defense, and (b) maintain a high level of proficiency in the game’s fundamentals.
The league’s efforts to give the games and players a uniform, professional, “corporate” stamp seem to be determined to justify the nickname of “No Fun League.”
The league’s aggressive drive to maximize revenues (e.g., merchandising the hell out of everything, the horrible “Color Rush” uniforms, the entire Los Angeles saga, the pushing of games – and, sooner or later, a team – to London, etc.) also detract from the play of the game itself.
Officiating / Rules – I put these two together because to me it really is one issue. Yes, there is “bad” officiating. But moreso for me there is a frustration with some of the what I will call “un-natural” rules, and attendant officiating. Did he catch the ball? Welllllllllll – let’s spend 12 minutes looking at slo-mo from 8 different angles and consult our rules expert in New York. FFS! Can a human being see that he caught the ball or not? Maybe we need to go back to refs on the field being the final say, period. The whole thing slows down the game and creates viewer frustration.
Clock – OK, there are 9 seconds left in the game, so that means I can expect the game to be over in – 38 minutes, with commercial breaks and timeouts, etc. I believe if Einstein were alive today he would be obsessed with finding a formula to describe how time slows down in the last few minutes of play. Another frustration that takes me out of the game.
Competing options – As others have mentioned, hey I could be binge watching Netflix, or Amazon, or HULU, or HBO Go, or DWTS that I DVR’ed, or or or.
Underlying notions of injury / bad behavior – The underlying notions that are not really discussed much by the commentators during the game – career ending injuries and off field bad behavior. We all know the stories, so watching a game we can’t help but have thoughts about them. Yes, this includes kneeling for the national anthem, if that’s what floats your boat. But again, it takes me out of the game to know that the guy who just tackled the receiver beat a murder rap, or the top draft quarterback had a rape investigation buried while in college, or the guy who twisted his knee will probably never play again and end up broke, or the guy who just got his bell rung will die in 10 years from a traumatic brain injury.
Yackety yack – 1. During the game, sometimes the commentators will yak on and on and I have no idea what they are conveying. They are speaking English, they are speaking in complete sentences, but frankly it’s gibberish to a viewer like me. I didn’t play the game so I don’t have the level of understanding that some are talking to. They need to bring it up a notch. 2. 24/7/365 commentary. They play one 3 hour game, and then 17 tv channels and 49 radio stations have 1,194 different experts replay and comment on every second of play over and over again. Enough!
A frisbee dog at halftime would be a nice little shot in the arm, I think.
I’m not sure that youth participation matters that much. Pop Warner football never topped more than 250,000 participants nationwide anyway. Little League draws ten times that number, yet college and pro football easily remains at least as popular as MLB. For that matter, kids have been abandoning Little League for some time now, without hurting major league popularity, and conversely all the kids playing soccer have never translated to more than limited success at the pro level in the US.
You are definitely not part of some of the same online groups I’m in.
The London connection can’t be ignored. The Rams and Giants played one of those games. It came on at 6:30am and 9:30 am in the two largest markets. Who thought that was a good idea? I can’t tell what they are trying to accomplish but those games can’t be good for the overall ratings.
Sunday night, Monday night and Thursday night are the spotlight games. No other football competition for any of them. Most of those games have sucked this year. And there was scheduling conflicts with a couple of the debates which I hear were of some interest to people.
So when you are talking about total rating for the season the multiple early morning London games and the sucky national games have to be taken into account.
To add to the OP’s question about the protests around the National Anthem:
It’s clear that a segment of the NFL fanbase is / was incensed over it. I think any actual impact on viewership would have been a very short-term thing – angry fans might’ve watched other things for a week or two, but you don’t hear much (if anything) about the players’ protests now. As the protests become less visible in the news, I suspect that fans who were offended by it would be coming back.
Re: NASCAR – is NASCAR doing anything differently in the past year or two (or, has the storyline of the past season or two been particularly compelling for fans)? NASCAR’s been a big-time fan draw for a long while, and I don’t know that it helps explain the NFL viewership declines, which are really in the past year.