NFL’s ratings drop a quality-control matter
Attempting to compare the ratings of NFL and Major League Baseball games doesn’t even correlate enough to use the old apples-to-oranges cliché. It’s more like apples to cumquats, maybe.
When the NFL surpassed baseball as the national pastime — and if it didn’t officially happen during the last generation, it’s happened during the current one — it’s largely because football had television as a co-conspirator.
Football, ideally anyway, fits snugly into a three-hour window on Sunday afternoon, with a punctuation mark on the week’s games coming on ABC’s (and later, ESPN’s) Monday night marquee. It has far fewer games than baseball, and thus each regular-season matchup should carry more importance. There were — and still are — no regional cable networks carrying the games, which meant every last viewer was watching a national broadcast.
The NFL wasn’t created for television — the league and the medium didn’t become completely copacetic until after the visionary Pete Rozelle became NFL commissioner in 1960 — but it sure did become an obvious and extraordinarily lucrative marriage once they found each other.
But the NFL is seeing significant declines in ratings this season after years of dominating the fall Nielsen leaderboards. All of the NFL’s Sunday, Monday, and Thursday prime-time broadcasts are down at least 18 percent from a year ago, with similar drops in the standard Sunday afternoon windows.
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