This is the real question. Surely Saturday would increase the viewership compared with Sunday, regardless of start time?
If these numbers are correct, that would be one of the worst changes they could make. Sunday is the best day for primetime viewership and Saturday is the second worst (and almost the worst).
Minneapolis about 9:30pm was just below zero, with a wind chill of -14. That and the high levels of security seemed to have saved us from Philly fans atrocious behavior.
Bars only open to 1am too.
Are you kidding? Saturday night TV is a wasteland of failures. The only worse time is Friday nights. People go out on Saturday nights; they don’t stay home glued to the boob-tube. 
People still work on Saturdays. But Sundays are the day that most people don’t work.
As for the OP’s question: it already starts at 6:30PM on the East Coast and 3:30PM on the West Coast. It can’t really start much earlier.
Also, don’t most people stay up at least until the news at 11 (10 central)? I always assumed the reason people call in “sick” is because they were drinking and have a hangover, not because it was all that late.
If they ever go to a 18 game schedule they should move the Super Bowl to Presidents Day weekend.
As a West Coaster, I’d be fine with a 2:00 start time. We have games at 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m during the season, and we watch those. On the other hand, how does the East Coast handle Sunday and Monday night games, which start much later (but go faster)?
League management was fairly seriously pushing for an 18-game schedule a few years ago, which the players were strongly against (mostly due to concerns about the health impact on players). With the increased scrutiny on concussions and head trauma over the past two seasons, as well as declines in TV ratings for the past two seasons, the push for 18 games seems to have largely evaporated.
We stay up later?
Though, seriously, my normal bedtime is around midnight anyways. And most of my friends (aside from the teachers among us) generally don’t have issues staying up to watch a Sunday night game.
I’m sure it’ll pop back up during the next contract negotiation, then the NFL will “back down” making the players feel like they won something while accepting a worse contract.
I once heard on some sports talk radio show that the Superb Owl, or its predecessor, once WAS on Saturday night. I totally forget the history and why it got pushed to Sunday. However, the host had a good argument for bringing it back to Saturday night. You could have Sunday to sober up! You’d think the beer companies and their PR geniuses would think of the additional profit they stand to make and pressure the NFL bigwigs to move the game to Saturday! I guess this is just too smart.
The 17th and 18th games would replace the 3rd and 4th preseason games.
Every Super Bowl has been on a Sunday. In 2013 when the game was played outdoors at MetLife Stadium, there were concerns that bad weather might force it to be played on a Saturday or Monday but the weather cooperated and Sunday weather was nice. Maybe you’d heard people on the radio speculating that year about a potential Saturday game and misremembered?
The only thing that has changed is that they used to have fewer postseason games and so the SB used to happen in mid-late January. These days it’s always the first Sunday in February.
It was talked about around 2012 when the NFL started a week later and NASCAR moved the Daytona 500 back so it wouldn’t conflict. But it didn’t happen and The Great American Race has returned to its usual date. Once upon a time the NFL didn’t want to play the SupervBowl in February in they had some with only one week off (such as in 1983 between the Dolphins and Redskins) so they would be in January. But they have lost that aversion.
But if you are at a party with 15 people are you watching the game (and more importantly the commercials) as much as if two people are at home? Do ratings systems accurately reflect eyeballs and not just tvs? And nowadays most businesses are not concerned with making money; they want as much money as they can possibly make.
Ratings most definitely only record TVs and not eyes.
Case in point… Do you know where yesterday’s Super Bowl had the best ratings? Not Boston, not Philadelphia… It was in BUFFALO. That’s because everyone in Buffalo stayed home to watch it. People cheering for their home teams gather together and make an event of it so you have large groups watching a single TV and it only gets counted once.
Not entirely true, though for purposes of the overnight ratings that Nielsen has already released, as per the article you posted, it’s true.
Nielsen also uses “People Meters”, and diaries, to record the actual viewers within the household who are watching the show that’s on a TV, particularly during the “sweeps periods.”
But, as I understand it, the “overnights” by market don’t go to that level of detail.
Thanks. I’m not sure whether that would hold true for a big sporting event associated with lots of drinking, but maybe it’s more a European thing. The last few UEFA Champions League finals, for example, have been held on a Saturday night. Then people have Sunday to recover/travel and most don’t need to take a day off work.
Football World Cup finals I think are often on a Sunday, but I believe that’s as much to do with giving the players an extra rest day after their semi-final matches, at the end of a long competition. If that wasn’t an issue I suspect they would prefer a Saturday.
The Super Bowl’s timing is perfect, IMO. And a lot of companies have already accepted that productivity in the following Monday is going to be shit, so it’s almost like a half holiday.
I just wish other sports would get the memo and start earlier. Why doesn’t the college football championship game get played on a Sunday from now on? Why Monday night at 8:15 PM? The game ended after midnight this time.
The Super Bowl has always been on Sunday. I looked at NFL championship games for ten years prior to that and a random selection before that and they were all on Sunday too.
The problem with moving the Super Bowl to Saturday is really obvious; it would not be on Sunday. The NFL has successfully made Sunday basically Football Day. The branding of Sunday as being the day professional football takes place is one of the most remarkable achievements in sports marketing history. Sure, there’s football on other days too, but Sunday is NFL DAY. Entire families and groups of friends (including my wife’s whole family) stop everything to watch NFL football. Sunday is intrinsically part of the product, and for good reasons, in part because, as has been pointed out, people don’t watch a lot of TV on Saturdays.
It is perhaps easily forgotten that the NFL was not always the marketing juggernaut it is now. Up until the late 1960s, the biggest team sport in America, by a mile, was baseball. Baseball is still a really strong second, but it’s definitely second. How did the NFL overtake what had been the most popular sport in America for a century? In fact, how did it overtake COLLEGE football, which until at least 1960 was more popular than the NFL?
The answer is television.
There wasn’t anything different about the sports of football or baseball in 1972 as opposed to 1962 or 1952; in fact, by any measure of the elements of competition or entertainment, baseball had improved by a huge amount in that period of time; it was a way more accessible and enjoyable spectacle in 1972 than it had ever been. What the NFL did was realize that the future wasn’t in selling tickets, it was in selling TV ads.
In terms of the business of sports the absolutely most important thing that has ever happened was an event few people have heard of; in 1962, Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, got the owners to agree to not have individual TV contracts with local stations, but rather to have the league own all the TV rights. It was a stroke of incredible genius. It gave the NFL a degree of bargaining power that had never existed before, and it allowed the NFL to carefully, strategically design not only how the TV coverage would take place, but to change the sport itself to suit television. An NFL game is a TV show first and a live sporting event second. Over the last 55 years absolutely everything about the NFL has been methodically shaped, adjusted, and adjusted again to maximize the value of the product as a TV show. Even highlights were managed; the “NFL Films” outfit that makes a game recap look and sound like old newsreels of “Victory at Sea” was a calculated effort in every respect.
The NFL became the most popular sports league in the world because of television. No question about it. They saw that Americans were becoming TV viewers, not live fans, before anyone else did. The NFL now makes more money from TV rights than it does from every other revenue stream combined. It makes more money from TV rights than the entire annual revenue of any other sports league in the world except Major League Baseball.
A part of that genius was the co-opting of Sunday as Football Day.