Things Just Got A Whole Lot Worse For NFL As Anthem Protests Continue

by Margaret M. | November 10, 2017 11:44 am

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Writing in NBC Sports, Mike Florio uses his most recent column to discuss the ratings decline afflicting the NFL.

First, he points out that there is nothing left to save the ratings dip — last year at this point in the season, there was a post-election ratings hike, which will not happen this year. He believes there is nothing to indicate that the last eight weeks of the season (starting now) will reverse course.

As we’ve reported, in the last few weeks on social media there has been a push to encourage regular NFL viewers to choose this weekend to turn off their sets. The disrespect of the flag and the National Anthem is a bridge too far for NFL fans over the Veteran’s Day weekend[2] and we can all expect that the boycott will bring another ratings dip. Right now, Boycott the NFL on Facebook has over 216,000 likes and has a slew of people agreeing that they’re disgusted with recent conduct and have already stopped watching games.

Continuing with Mike Florio’s piece in the Professional Football Times, he takes information from Darren Rovell from ESPN who said in the middle of this week that their channel’s total ratings are down 5.5% in the first nine weeks of the 2017 football season, compared to the first nine weeks of the 2016 season. And since last year, bounced back up again once Trump won, the gap for the last few weeks will be yuge.

Florio gives suggestions on how to fix the ratings decline, including that they should change up their scheduling to make sure that the “best games” will be given the best Sunday spots. He says that they need “creativity” to solve the ratings problem, but for most of the audience all the creativity that’s needed is basically Trump’s solution: they should’ve started giving out one-game suspensions to Colin Kaerpernick and others who chose to do anything except stand at attention for the National Anthem.

As for ESPN, they lost almost half a million subscribers in October[3], with 15,000 people every day in that month cancelling their access to the channel. And on Halloween, we reported that their executives are considering that they might have to restrict Monday Night Football[4] in a bid to give people less choice, forcing them to at least watch the Sunday games. There has already been talk about dropping Thursday night games[5] for the last few weeks of the season.