The Reasons Why NFL Ratings Are Diving

There are many reasons why NFL ratings are down -11% this year. Individually, I am sure everyone has their theories. The ones noted here by a collection of fans are very good and well thought out. But I will offer a narrative for why ratings are down, summed up in two words…

Roger Goodell

Most of the points below can be traced to decisions made by Goodell over the last decade to get more revenue. The unbridled quest for revenue dilutes the quality of the product. Of course Goodell cannot be blamed for everything wrong with the NFL, but it is under his stewardship that the erosion has taken place. When things start to unravel, you do not look at what happened recently to see where the decay took place. That is the symptom, the trigger. Instead, we will go back 10 years, which is not so uncoincidentally when Goodell became the Commissioner.

The NFL is a business. It has a product, employees, franchises and revenue. If you want to understand business quickly w/o reading the Wall Street Journal every day for years, pick up a book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. Collins will give you a crash course in what makes businesses good and what makes them great. One of the timeless epiphanies from this book is a blunt directive: CONFRONT THE BRUTAL FACTS. It means that any company that does not acknowledge and then confront the outside forces that are threatening the competitiveness of its business is extremely vulnerable to being made irrelevant in future years. Eastman Kodak made film profitably. Kodachrome. The company was a stalwart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Then the world went digital. Kodak did not confront the brutal facts and adapt. Apple, with its free photo app, is now the biggest market cap in the world. Kodak is dust in the wind. I am not implying that Kodak could be Apple. But good businesses adjust to change and make that an opportunity.

The NFL was the dynamo sports entertainment product of the previous two generations. Pete Rozelle had a product. He protected it as much as he grew it. Tagliabue followed and benefited from Rozelle’s momentum. There was some dilution but it was hard to screw up what he inherited. Goodell inherited the inheritance. Two generations removed from the beginning, the growth that Rozelle nurtured and Tabliabue enjoyed was not sustainable forever. But for the owners, it was grow grow grow. Milk that cow. Grow the money. At what cost? Everything that Goodell did was about money for the owners, at the exclusion of nurturing the product.

1. THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL.  There is nothing that is a better example of excess than TNF. Started in 2006, the wheels may have gotten rolling by Goodell’s predecessor but Goodell did not miss an opportunity to suck the eyeballs dry with this vehicle of stupidity. For starters, the quality of these games is sh*t. Players have not recovered from the trainwreck of Sunday, and yet there they are, week after week, lining up on Thursday nights. Leaches, thy name is saturation. TNF started as this limited experiment. It was actually designed to augment the NFL Network as a cable channel. Yes, folks, it is ALWAYS about the money. TNF was a way for the NFL to roll their own, to bolster their media property by injecting their own games into the mix. Who here remembers announcers such as Bryant Gumbel and Matt Millen? Awful. While the quality of the broadcasts improved, the dilution continued. At first it “only” had 5 broadcasts on Thursday nights. By 2014 it (along with CBS) was covering every Thursday night.  This is the Goodell we know and love hate. More is better! More money is more better!! Why torture 10 teams when we can torture 32 with these midweek slopfests! The quality of teams that the NFL brought in on these contests was seemingly always the dregs, and to top it off we saw players who barely knew the gameplan, ill-prepared for what was about to hit them. (This article was written during a game between the Titans and Jaguars. Damn, missed that barn burner!) The result was (and still is) unbalanced contests where one team shows up and the other does not. Bad football. The dilution is seen when Monday Night ratings drop by 24%- why? Burnout. Viewer fatigue. No mas. There is only so much football that people can watch. Remember, 2014 was when TNF was expanded.
2. THE 2011 CBA.  Goodell’s lack of stewardship of the NFL was on full display during this titanic struggle between Labor and the Owners (aka Goodell’s boss). The strike was not settled by the Commissioner. It was settled by Bob Kraft and Jeff Saturday. The players wanted more. The owners wanted more. The fans got screwed. By morphing the practicing schedules and modifying the work rules, player health and quality of play suffered as a result of this agreement. It is the Commissioner’s job to protect the product and the interests of the fans. Remember that the fan is the customer, and without the customer the business is dead. I am sure Goodell worked hard to get everyone back to work, but the consequences of that agreement are still being felt.
3. INJURIES. Courtesy of Football Outsiders, who has data going back to 2007, we can track the hard numbers on the adjusted games lost (“AGL”) to starters. In 2007, AGL was 45 games lost by starters on average by the 32 teams. It has steadily risen through the last decade to 69 games lost per team on average in 2015. So in 8 seasons, we have seen a 50% increase in injury rates to starters. That is a +5% average increase in injuries to starters every year for 8 consecutive years. That is tangible significant dilution in the quality of the play, because viewers pay to see the stars, not the backups. We are getting more backups and less starters.
4. STEVE YOUNG: “SEPTEMBER IS THE NEW PRESEASON.” Readers of this NY Giants blog do not like it when I go old school on them and talk about football in better days when we walked uphill to school 6 miles each way (in the snow). But Steve Young said it, I didn’t. Coaches are hiding their players from so much of preseason to avoid injury (because of the limitations put on them via the CBA) that by the time they hit September they are still in diapers for executing the playbook. We see it with sloppy football. It is not crisp. The efficient teamwork is not there. This is Goodell’s league. He is the one who presides over this mess. He looks the other way as long as the viewers are there. He let it persist because the numbers were growing. His bonus was growing. The owners’ wallets were growing. Steve Young noted the poor quality of football 2 years ago on September 22, 2014. It articulated a palpable degradation. But Goodell did nothing because the money was still coming in.
5. WHAT IS A CATCH? The rules are mind boggling. This is fundamental to the game. Madness.
6. KICKOFF HORSE MANURE. The NFL wants less kickoff returns (for player safety) so it brings the touchback to the 25 yard line. Result? More useless kickoffs sandwiched in between possessions, which are sandwiching gobs of commercials. I think I will get a sandwich. Or maybe I will just go out and miss the game entirely.  That first link at the top of this article refers to many fans who explain how the NFL product has become unwatchable. This is the Goodell money machine in action. Revenue for everything, the product be damned. If the commercials aren’t there, the revenue growth isn’t there. Goodell only got a $32MM salary and bonus in 2015 instead of $34MM in 2014. There is nothing brutal about that fact.
7. LACK OF INVESTMENT IN GOOD OFFICIATING. NFL referees with decades of experience can make very credible salaries of $173K per year, but line judges make far less. These are not full time jobs. They should be, given how poor the officiating is and how much money the NFL makes. Why they cannot invest a pittance on making these crews world class to uphold the quality of the game is a direct reflection on the man at the top, who himself gets paid much much more than all of these guys combined.
8. LONDON FOOTBALL. Let’s fly these guys 7 to 10 hours east with the 3rd place team from one division vs the 3rd place team from another division, get cr*ppy football and … do it all over again!  Let’s do it on a pitch with poor field conditions. Let’s start it as a novelty with 1 game a season in 2007, the driver of this schlock none other than Roger Goodell. Then, let’s expand it for more money and an international audience in 2013 to 2 games. Then 3 games in 2014 & 2015.  Then 4 games in London in 2016. See the Roger pattern? Growth at any price. The NFL is going international! 930AM ET games? Garbage vs Garbage vs Garbage vs Garbage. But hey, it’s on the NFL Network, so let’s protect that shield of garbage with more real programming dollars for our network! Pimp the bonus.
9. FLAG FOOTBALL. Do we have to elaborate on the penalties called in each game that ruin the competition? Games are bad enough, and then it gets worse when your CB is flagged for pass interference for breathing on the defender, 38 yards. Gamechanger.
10. NO HITTING ALLOWED. Goodell the lawyer is worried about lawsuits ($$$) and owners being held culpable for player injuries. So the contact in football is being systematically banned, piece by piece. Where have you gone Ray Nitschke, Dick Butkus and Lawrence Taylor? Many of these hits would be penalized today.
11. FANTASY. Goodell quietly embraced Fantasy Football (read: looked the other way) because it meant more money and ratings. Or so he thought. The NFL has not adapted to the Fantasy World, and instead Fantasy is cannibalizing the NFL.  The game itself does not matter anymore. The only thing that matters is how many points your player got. So who cares if the game s*cks, because the Fantasy wagerer is not even watching the game.

The items listed above did not happen overnight. London was 1 game a year, now it is 4. TNF was 5 games, now it is 16. If Goodell has his way, he would make it an 18 week season instead of 17, because that is 5% growth. He’d put more teams in the playoffs and make the regular season even less important to watch. Forget that another game is not needed to determine bonafide playoff teams. It is all about dilution and saturation. The product suffers but as long as the NFL is making more money the rest does not matter.

The product is unwatchable for many. Diehards like football bloggers and readers of football blogs are the exception to the rule. The trend is a slow erosion in the quality of the product. This ratings drop is the first moment of shock for the NFL. The denial has started with it being blamed on an election year. These are the props. Rozelle’s juggernaut was never derailed by an election year. But Goodell’s corroded vessel is feeling the hit. It took a decade to create these problems. It will take that long to repair the product… if the NFL, its owners and Commissioner, confront the brutal facts.