There’s no real nice way of saying this, but people just don’t seem to care about watching the NFL anymore. On a day that saw a Vice President leave his seat in protest, the ratings for Sunday Night Football once again fell below the number for the previous week.
NBC’s Sunday Night Football earned 10.6/18 in metered market results, that fall constitutes a 3% drop from last week’s numbers. That’s especially bad considering that last week featured a good-but-not-great Seahawks team, and an Andrew Luck-less Indianapolis Colts team, that seemed to be missing 38 starters.
By comparison, last Sunday night’s match-up between an undefeated Chiefs team, and an exciting Texans team playing in a large market, should have done significantly better than the Seahawks-Colts. Such a dynamic might suggest an even more scary trend than the NFL wants to admit.
Not only that, the rating for the Texans-Chiefs match-up only barely beat the number for last year’s Week 5 match-up. Why is that a problem? Isn’t it generally considered good to beat last year’s mark?
Yes.
However, when you look behind the numbers, problems emerge. The Texans-Chiefs game beat last year’s Week 5 SNF game by 4%. Though, the 2016 Week 5 game, between the Giants and the Packers, went up against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s second presidential debate. Making the rating for that game artificially low. So, the fact that the Texans-Chiefs game beat that number by 4%, doesn’t look nearly as impressive. Especially when you consider that debate was the first after video of then-candidate Trump engaging in locker room talk, emerged.
Not a good night or a good trend for the NFL.
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