Why the NFL's Ratings Are Declining

There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on because the NFL’s TV ratings are declining. Some want to blame it on that 2^nd string QB (maybe 1^st string this week, who can tell?) who won’t stand for the national anthem, but while I think that turned a few people off, I think it was just one piece of the puzzle—one more straw, if you will—in an overall picture of decline.

Why is it happening?

Could it be that the NFL did this to themselves?

Well, not them alone. Part of it’s our culture, and I’m not just referring to the fact that the NFL now has to compete with so many other offerings (movies, other sports, etc.).

Walk yourself through the last football game you watched. What did you do when it went to commercial break? If you’re like most people, you went either to the kitchen or the bathroom. (Maybe not on the first commercial break, but for later ones.)

There was a time, when there weren’t quite so many commercial breaks. During a change of possession, for instance, rather than going to a commercial break, we might hear the announcers talk about … whatever it is that announcers talk about, but presumably it was something about the game or its players that made us want to listen. Except during the Super Bowl, no one wants to watch the commercials, so we leave the room to either go take care of important matters or just because we’ve been conditioned to get up when the commercial starts.

But now, they’ve added commercials where they didn’t used to have them (or didn’t used to have so many of them). We get a commercial break during every change of possession, time out, injury on the field or—it seems—every time someone falls to the ground.

As proud Americans, we have trained ourselves to zone out through most commercials so … see what’s happening here? The NFL has trained us to zone out more often and then seems surprised when we don’t come back.

Really, I think that’s the crux of what has happened with the NFL: they trained us to step away and then it occurred to us over time that if we could leave that easily there wasn’t really a strong reason to return.

So we went to the restroom or the kitchen or just another channel and eventually we stayed there. Combine this with the cost of the tickets to see the game live, the poor quality of officiating (leading to the perception that the “sport” is no more real than professional wrestling), the spectacle of someone who makes 10x what most of us will make in a lifetime for one season of playing a game complaining about some injustice and the surprise to me isn’t that the NFL’s ratings are declining these days but wonder that it didn’t happen sooner.