Injuries put players and ratings in danger
For a variety of reasons, 2017 is an important year for the NFL. In this missive, we’ll confine the discussion to the NFL’s TV problem.
What else exactly would you call a scenario in which the league’s TV partners — ESPN, Fox, CBS, NBC and Direct TV — have committed $50 billion to televise games into the early 2020s, while ratings took a significant hit in 2016?
Sure, if you read any of the myriad articles and columns analyzing the reasons why such a big ratings fall occurred, they point out that the NFL can still rally large audience shares when compared to the fragmentation of viewers and the problems every medium is having with the attention span of those who are brought to the tubes, tablets, laptops and PCs. Those are shares that historically have provided ad sales that significantly best the huge rights fees those networks are paying.
But will the sales levels allow the media partnerships to profit beyond the $50 billion invested in this most recent rights deal? Will those profit levels reach a point that those same partners, or any newbies the can round up to try and up the ante, will have an appetite to be back for a deal that will now be at best a gamble?
To be fair, double-digit losses during the fall election cycle showed a drop-off of as high as 14-15 percent because the giant in everybody’s household was candidate Donald Trump. Two Monday evening televised debates went head-to-head with “Monday Night Football.” By the end of the year, the league was able to wipe off the sweat from its collective brows and treat an 8 percent loss of total viewers as if it were some sort of Pyrrhic victory.
It’s as if the league has no idea that the times they are a-changin’. It’s also as if the league doesn’t see the disgust fans have for player behavior off the field.
There is a very real understanding by fans that the league knew and lied about its knowledge of the dangers players have faced for years with the growing Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy problem related to traumatic head injuries. While the league took actions to protect itself from litigation, it knew the players were taking risks.
Whether watching from a cushy skybox or in the comfort of your own living room, it doesn’t change the fact that more and more there is an unclean feeling about watching players take such enormous risks with their personal well-being to entertain and feed our appetite for such grisly entertainment. While the days of glorifying the hardest hits on individual shows aimed at sharing the worst-of-the-worst hits may be behind us, the blood is what sells.
So how does the league demonstrate it really cares about player safety? This commissioner is so transparently hypocritical on the issue of player safety to the point of making a farce of the debate. Out of one side of his mouth, he professes to care about the health of the union faithful, while trying to institute an increase from 16 to 18 regular-season games.
Sundays and Mondays were deemed not enough days of the week when there were more profits to be gained by having players play with just three days’ rest from a Sunday to a Thursday. And why confine fans’ Sunday viewing habits from 1 p.m. until after midnight when you can feed fans in America breakfast at Wembley and football on Sunday mornings at 9:30?
What has the league done to make the product better for the upcoming season? Laughably, the league now sees touchdown celebrations, which it began to outlaw as long ago as 1984, as fun again. So all those penalties we had to suffer through for the past decade didn’t really matter after all?
And finally, Hank Williams Jr. and his iconic “MNF” theme song with the catchphrase “Are You Ready for Some Football?” is coming back. Williams was fired six years ago due to his controversial comments comparing former President Barack Obama playing golf with House Speaker John Boehner to Adolf Hitler playing golf with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Now that sounds like a real game-changer in helping gain back audience shares. And after all, isn’t that what it’s all about for Roger Goodell?
Top photo: NFL helmets through the years, courtesy Erik Drost, Flickr
Stan “The Fan” Charles is the founder and publisher of PressBox.
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