{"id":1256,"date":"2024-02-12T16:58:36","date_gmt":"2024-02-12T16:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/?p=1256"},"modified":"2024-02-12T16:58:36","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T16:58:36","slug":"2024-super-bowl-will-be-the-ultimate-ratings-touchdown-for-a-resurgent-league","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/2024-super-bowl-will-be-the-ultimate-ratings-touchdown-for-a-resurgent-league\/","title":{"rendered":"2024 Super Bowl will be the ultimate ratings touchdown for a resurgent league"},"content":{"rendered":"

LAS VEGAS \u2014 In the spirit of Sin City, don\u2019t bet against the NFL.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s\u00a0big game\u00a0looks set to be one of the premiere American cultural events of the year,\u00a0pitting\u00a0defending champions the Kansas City Chiefs against the five-time Super Bowl-winning San Francisco 49ers.<\/p>\n

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Add in the mere hope of an appearance from international pop superstar\u00a0Taylor Swift, and you\u2019ve got the makings of a juggernaut.<\/p>\n

The expected sky-high ratings will likely be a capstone to one of the most remarkable years in NFL history, at least in terms of television viewership. The league \u2014 not long ago seen by some detractors as a fading enterprise tarnished by controversy \u2014 could reach the apex of its influence and reach.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s obsession with football showed no signs of abating in 2023, cementing the NFL as one of the last vestiges of the monoculture in an era of fractured media consumption. NFL games made up a staggering 93 of the top 100 broadcast programs last year, according to data from Nielsen, a leading media measurement firm.<\/p>\n

The increase was driven in part by popular \u201cMonday Night Football\u201d simulcasts on ESPN and ABC, not to mention the headline-grabbing\u00a0courtship between Swift\u00a0and\u00a0star Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.<\/p>\n

NFL games are also more widely accessible on streaming platforms, if you\u2019re willing to shell out for subscriptions \u2014 there\u2019s the Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV, for example, and Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video.<\/p>\n

NFL programming continues to rise as a share of overall watch time, too: 38.62% of national traditional TV viewing on Jan. 28 was dedicated to the AFC and NFC championship games, according to Inscape, the data division of the consumer electronics company Vizio. Including studio coverage of those playoff games, the NFL accounted for nearly half of the traditional TV viewing minutes watched for the day, at 46.29%.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs national linear [traditional] TV audiences shrink, the NFL is becoming one of the only games in town for remaining audiences and advertisers, and that shows from a programming standpoint,\u201d said John Cassillo, an analyst at TVREV, a research group.<\/p>\n

Syracuse University professor and TV historian Robert Thompson, who predicted that Sunday\u2019s game could draw a whopping 114 million viewers, echoed that sentiment: \u201cThe Super Bowl is really the last of the truly communal TV experiences, making it not only immune to the audience decline that all other programming types are experiencing, but in fact positioned for growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

TV audiences also appear to be hungering for collective joy following the brutal isolation of the height of the Covid years.<\/p>\n

\u201cPost-pandemic, there\u2019s that ongoing desire to be with and around other people\u201d to watch this game, said University of Nevada, Las Vegas sociology professor and pop culture researcher Michael Borer, predicting that Swift would move the needle if she shows up at Allegiant Stadium to cheer on Kelce.<\/p>\n

NFL\u2019s rebirth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In the early 2010s, the NFL looked rock solid. The Super Bowl played in 2010, won\u00a031-17 by the New Orleans Saints\u00a0over the Indianapolis Colts, drew a then-record 106 million viewers, the first time the big game\u2019s viewership had grown to nine digits. The average television viewership in the subsequent regular season reached 17.9 million.<\/p>\n

It seemed at the time\u00a0<\/strong>like there was nowhere to go but up as another record was broken in the 2015 game when an all-time high of 114.8 million Americans watched\u00a0New England\u2019s dramatic 28-24 victory\u00a0over the Seattle Seahawks. Regular-season viewership went up to an average of 18.1 million that year.<\/p>\n

But then something happened on the way to ratings infinity: Viewership went stagnant and, gasp, even declined.<\/p>\n

Nielsen data shows that average television viewership for regular-season games dipped in the Donald Trump era, dropping to some 15 million in 2017.<\/p>\n

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During Trump\u2019s first year in the White House, he dragged the NFL into the national culture wars by calling for players who kneeled for\u00a0social justice during the national anthem\u00a0to be fired. The ratings-obsessed president blamed the league\u2019s viewership slump on the protests.<\/p>\n

But even before Trump, the league was dogged by years of negative headlines around head injuries suffered by some of its players, which put a harsh spotlight on the physical toll of the game. Youth participation in football fell. Barack Obama famously said that if he had a son, he wouldn\u2019t want him to play pro football.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was the height of the social justice movement and also the brain injuries were, no pun intended, on everyone\u2019s mind,\u201d Borer said.<\/p>\n

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The 2019 title game slipped back down to eight digits as 98.9 million people tuned into what\u2019s widely regarded as the most boring recent title game, as\u00a0New England beat the Los Angeles Rams, 13-3,\u00a0in a defensive-minded snoozer.<\/p>\n

Then another sub-100 million audience of 95.8 million checked in for the Covid season\u2019s title game,\u00a0won by ageless wonder Tom Brady\u00a0and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 31-9, over the Chiefs in 2021.<\/p>\n

Jason Lynch, a curator at the Paley Center for Media, insisted those down years had nothing to do with event\u2019s baseline popularity and could easily be tied to randomly bad play on the field.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat impacts the ratings more is whether the game is competitive or not,\u201d said Lynch, creator of\u00a0the museum\u2019s exhibit\u00a0\u201cBeyond the Big Game.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIf you have a game like in 2021, the Tampa Bay-Kansas City matchup,\u00a0that was pretty lopsided\u00a0from the beginning. There was\u00a0no reason for people to stick around. The ratings are the average number of viewers who watch per minute, and by the second half of the game, there were far fewer people watching.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since that 2021 flub, the Super Bowl has come back with consecutive improvements, as audiences of 101 million and 113 million tuned into and clicked on the last two title games. Regular-season numbers also rebounded over the last three years; an average of 17.9 million viewers tuned into regular-season games last year, according to Nielsen data.<\/p>\n

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Lynch argued the NFL isn\u2019t bouncing back as\u00a0much as it\u2019s shaking off\u00a0a few years of anomalies.<\/p>\n

\u201cA 10 million swing in direction, that\u2019s not nothing,\u201d Lynch said. But when the baseline is about 100 million viewers, he added, \u201cthat\u2019s just a 10% drop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say your average hit broadcast drama or comedy, maybe you\u2019re going to bring in 10 million, which is a best-case scenario at this point,\u201d Lynch said. \u201cA 10% drop from that is only 1 million. That\u2019s incredibly common week to week. But it\u2019s more pronounced [in the Super Bowl] because these numbers are so much larger.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hype of this year\u2019s game has surely been pushed by \u201cthe perpetually discussed \u2018Taylor Swift effect,\u2019 breathlessly waiting if she makes it back from\u00a0Tokyo\u201d from a Super Bowl-eve show in the Japanese capital, Thompson said.<\/p>\n

Borer, the UNLV sociology professor, agreed that Swift has gotten a cohort of viewers hooked on football \u2014 even if it\u2019s just to watch her cheering in the stands.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s gotten more people into seeing the game and seeing her, it\u2019s wild,\u201d Borer said. \u201cEven those few glimpses of her during the game, people who are not fans [of football] are really excited by that. It brings different demographics. Swifties are girls to middle-aged women, maybe a demographic that\u2019s not the typical NFL fan.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to downplay Swift\u2019s potential impact on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s going to be part of the population where Taylor is going to be their reason to watch this game, a chance to see her,\u201d Lynch said.\u00a0\u201cIf it turns out that this year\u2019s game is the most watched, which CBS is certainly hoping is going to be the case, I think Taylor will probably be the thing that\u2019ll help put it over the top.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LAS VEGAS \u2014 In the spirit of Sin City, don\u2019t bet against the NFL. Sunday\u2019s\u00a0big game\u00a0looks set to be one of the premiere American cultural events of the year,\u00a0pitting\u00a0defending champions the Kansas City Chiefs against the five-time Super Bowl-winning San Francisco 49ers. Add in the mere hope of an appearance from international pop superstar\u00a0Taylor Swift, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1260,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1256\/revisions\/1260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}