Despite all the mindshare-gobbling distractions of an election year and the ongoing erosion of TV usage, the NFL is on pace to put up its strongest ratings since 2015. And while the league’s stranglehold over our screens shows no sign of slackening, the season-long viewership boost may seem like a bit of a head-scratcher, as it coincides with year-over-year declines in the big primetime windows.
While the NFL’s deliveries aren’t significantly higher than they were through Week 14 of the 2023 campaign—to date, the league is averaging 18.1 million impressions per game, good for a 2% lift from 17.9 million—the current nine-year high is nothing to sneeze at, given that overall TV usage has dropped 7% versus the analogous period last fall. As it happens, the drop in tube time coincides with similar linear losses in the NFL’s marquee after-dark windows.
Per Sportico’s analysis of the Nielsen live-plus-same-day ratings data, Disney’s Monday Night Football package is weathering a 7% drop in TV deliveries, as its average draw of 14.7 million viewers is off last season’s pace by some 1.1 million viewers per telecast.
Aside from the aforementioned shrinkage in TV consumption, the MNF declines largely can be attributed to a lighter broadcast presence—last year at this time, 14 games were either simulcast or aired as standalone outings on the big-reach ABC network, whereas this season’s count is at 10—and one very gnarly single-game comp. In Week 11 of 2023, the Super Bowl LVII rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs scared up just shy of 29 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, making it the most-watched installment of MNF in 27 years. This season’s comparable Texans-Cowboys game delivered 12 million fewer viewers.
NBC’s Sunday Night Football is facing similar headwinds, with TV deliveries averaging 19.3 million viewers per broadcast, which works out to a 5% dip. But the vanilla TV numbers don’t account for the gains made on the streaming front; add the impressions served up by Peacock and a clutch of other digital platforms, and SNF’s per-game average jumps to around 21.6 million viewers per night.
As such, NBC’s all-in Sunday night deliveries are up a tick versus last year, as the rapid expansion of the window’s digital audience has more than offset the contraction on the TV front. And while the appetite for digital consumption wasn’t exactly ravenous in Peacock’s early days, younger fans have since proven instrumental in supercharging the binary binging.
Three years ago, streaming accounted for just under 5% of all SNF impressions; through Week 14, one-tenth of the audience is taking in the action via non-TV platforms. While the rest of the traditional media space grapples with an ever-woozier paradigm shift, the NFL seems to have achieved a sort of homeostasis. TV’s share of video impressions may have plummeted 24% in the last three years, but you’d never know that from looking at the league’s deliveries.
Perhaps nowhere is the digital impact more evident than on the NFL’s third night of regularly scheduled games. Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football showcase is now averaging 13.6 million viewers per week, which not only marks a 9% improvement versus the year-ago period but is slightly higher than Fox’s standalone TNF deliveries during 2021. (That was the final season the package aired on linear TV.)
And as with Peacock’s contribution to the growth of Sunday Night Football, Amazon owes a debt of gratitude to the less-wrinkly football enthusiasts among us. With a median age of 48.7 years, the TNF audience is 14.3 years younger than the crowd that huddles around broadcast’s primetime hearth, which translates to relatively massive deliveries among consumers in the dollar demo. TNF is currently averaging 6.28 million adults 18-49 per game, which would make it the third-biggest draw on TV if, you know, it actually aired on TV. By way of comparison, the average primetime entertainment program on the Big Four networks now attracts 472,635 adults under 50 per episode. The NFL can dig up more advertiser-coveted viewers during a cursory scrounge of its sofa cushions.
If streaming has gone a long way toward keeping the NFL top-of-mind with its legions of fans, that’s not to say that creaky old TV doesn’t routinely turn on the jets whenever the Chiefs and Bills butt heads or the Cowboys flail their way through another frustrating loss. The national Sunday afternoon window shared by CBS and Fox is still the greatest show on turf; including the two Thanksgiving Day broadcasts, the 4:20 p.m. ET slot is averaging a TV-high 26.9 million viewers per week. That’s sufficient for a 1% year-to-year lift, or a net gain of around 354,000 impressions.
All eyes will be on that late-afternoon window this Sunday, as the NFL has taken the unconventional step of scheduling two Week 15 doubleheaders. Fox’s A-team will cover the Keystone State scuffle between the 10-3 Steelers and the 11-2 Eagles, both of which are perched atop their respective divisions, while CBS counters with a possible Super Bowl preview care of the 10-3 Bills and 12-1 Lions. Unless you’ve recently been embalmed, the prospect of Josh Allen squaring off against Dan Campbell’s charges in February is positively invigorating.
If the two late games should find millions of fans draining the batteries in their remotes as they yo-yo back and forth between Philly and Detroit, the networks are hoping that the rare 4:20 overlap won’t give rise to the ratings cannibalism that’s blighted previous doubleheader double-downs. Predictably enough, when the NFL experimented with Week 1 dual dubs from 2021-23, neither CBS nor Fox managed to put up their usual 25 million-plus numbers. Bruised by the head-to-head rumble for impressions, Fox drew a season-low 16.3 million viewers last season with its blowout Packers-Bears opener, while CBS fared better (21.4 million) with its more competitive Eagles-Patriots scrap.
Shifting the double-double to Week 15 should help alleviate some of the strain of the early-season crunch, although obviously presenting fans with a viable option in the late window will impact the individual in-game deliveries. In a standard single-late-game week, Bills-Lions would probably break the 30 million viewer mark, and an unencumbered Steelers-Eagles contest likely coasts to 26 million. At the network level, Sunday’s ratings won’t be as robust as they might have been under less overstimulating circumstances, but the collective turnout will be sufficient for the NFL to justify the practice.
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