The NFL’s audience has rebounded since competition from other sports and the presidential campaign abated, and with a playoff push by major market teams and a slightly expanded postseason yet to come, the league could finish strong in its last three weeks and enjoy another robust playoff.
It won’t be enough to reverse 2020’s overall year-over-year viewership decline, experts say, but it will continue to illustrate the league’s enduring strength at a time of rapid social change.
Average viewership for games since the Nov. 3 election is up 11% over games before that week, said Michael Mulvihill, head of strategy and analytics for Fox Sports, which owns the “Thursday Night Football” prime-time package and the Sunday afternoon NFC-centric package.
Heading into Week 14 on Dec. 10, overall TV and streaming viewership averaged 15.7 million, down 7% compared to 2019 — a figure that stood at 10% through four weeks.
“You wouldn’t necessarily expect November-December to be double digits better than September-October, that’s not something you see in a non-election year,” Mulvihill said. “There is something to the momentum being triggered in part by the absence of the election story.”
ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” has seen four consecutive weeks that improved on the yearlong average, said Flora Kelly, senior director, strategic and brand insights, though the most recent game was simulcast on ABC. Both Mulvihill and Kelly said the coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt viewing behavior, even if the historically intense period of direct competition has ceased.
“We’re pleasantly surprised,” Kelly said of the post-election period. “Again, it’s very difficult to predict where this will end up, but we are happy with what we’ve seen so far.”
In a memo to sponsors, rights holders and other partners on Dec. 3, the NFL focused on its comparative strength — “NFL games remain the top performing programming on television by a meaningful distance,” it reads. Also, the league says the year-to-year decline is not a cause for concern, comparing it favorably to the 12% decline it experienced in the last presidential election season in 2016.
Cable news viewership is still up between 10%-20% over last year, Mulvihill said. That likely reflects coverage of the Biden transition and the legal challenges from the defeated Trump campaign. But that’s down from the 30%-40% gain they were seeing during the campaign and the 300% gain they had during election week itself.
Also lending enthusiasm to the final few weeks: Excitement around the New York Giants and the Washington Football Team, two long-struggling major market teams that have played better in recent weeks and are now competing for a playoff spot.
There’s some hope those rivals could make up for the depressing state of affairs of another NFC East team. The Dallas Cowboys have fallen so far that the NFL flexed their Week 15 game with the 49ers out of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” in favor of Browns-Giants. In addition, the two new wild card games this year will provide a one-time boost to viewership and ad revenue.
Recent COVID-19 adjustments to the schedule have proved to be a mixed bag. NBC lost viewers when Baltimore-Pittsburgh was moved off Thanksgiving night, but Fox gained viewers when Washington-Pittsburgh was moved from a 1 p.m. Sunday regional window, when it would have gone to about 20% of the country, to last Monday evening, when it went to 45%.
Doug Perlman, founder and CEO of Sports Media Advisors, said the viewership decline this year is a “blip” not critical to the big picture of the value of the games amid rights negotiations with networks.
“I think it could impact the conversations on the fringes, but these negotiations are not about a math problem,” Perlman said. “So much of the NFL is really about its strategic value, so these sort of blips and numbers are not going to have a dramatic impact on where they come out.”
