NFL Kickoff Week 4: Guess what? The NFL is dying again
After an installment of Monday Night Football that drew the lowest ratings in the show’s history, the narrative of football’s decline has back to the fore, thanks to columnist Charles Robinson invoking Mark Cuban’s prediction that the NFL is years away from implosion.
Beyond the fact that using Cuban as a Cassandra foretelling the NFL’s downfall is a little problematic, given that the Mavericks owner has a vested interest in seeing football decline, there are reasons that this sweeping conclusion is a little hasty.
The ratings were not great on Monday night compared to the standard for MNF, or even against the same period in 2012 when the Obama-Romney debates were on. Of course, it’s fair to say the interest in the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was considerably higher than that for an incumbent president and a rather milquetoast challenger, as evidenced by the fact that the Clinton-Trump debate drew the biggest TV audience for anything since the early ‘80s. Add to the fact that the Monday night game featured the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons, two teams with meager national followings and neither of which made the postseason in 2015 - it was hardly a night the NFL would have anticipated to be huge anyway.
Robinson also points to a steady, if not dramatic, decline in Sunday Night Football viewership over the past few years, though has no way of showing whether that’s due to lessening interest in the NFL or can be attributed to cord cutters ditching TV altogether.
Proving a decline in interest over the viewership of a single game isn’t much help but it gets to a problem with the way football is perceived. In some ways, the NFL is helped by the scarcity of its product - teams only play 16 regular season games with single-elimination postseason games. So each game takes on immense expectation. If one prime time NFL game is a blowout, the entire narrative that night is about how watching the NFL is a bore.
With the exception of the GSW-OKC series and the Finals, the quality of this year’s NBA Playoffs wasn’t particularly strong. Several series weren’t particularly watchable. But with a smaller audience, there’s less national expectation. And the Finals finished strong, with an unexpected finish, so basketball has been able to ride that momentum through the summer.
The NFL can’t escape its many PR disasters of the last few years - whether it’s domestic violence, deceit about head injuries, or even Deflategate. They’ve become exhausting and synonymous with how the league is portrayed. The league would have to show real, sustained progress for years before crawling out of the shadow of those scandals.
Meanwhile there is concern that the quality of the product is diminishing. The Ringer had a piece that ran just before the season started with coaches complaining that the NFL is full of younger players who lack the fundamentals that were the norm in the NFL not long ago. Of course, this is partially the NFL’s own doing since having younger, cheaper talent on rosters is a function of how the current CBA structures salaries.
Some of that seems like it would be on the granular level, things a coach can focus on because he knows the scheme he is trying to execute and we do not. Other than rule changes, I’m not sure you could watch a game from 10 years ago and notice an appreciably different level of play than what you see today. There were sloppy, turnover-laden games in 2006 as well. Sometimes it seems like fans have expectations for swift, high-scoring affairs that are of character for how most of football is played.
The NFL remains the all-consuming behemoth of American sport. When you’re at the top, everyone is gunning for you. Journalists take aim because bringing things down - or proclaiming that they’re on the way down - moves the needle. There are many, many valid reasons to challenge the NFL, though the drive to do it likely would not be as strong without the financial incentive of tons of public interest. The NFL’s decline could be coming or even already here, but there isn’t a definitive way to prove it, at least not with a few weeks worth of TV ratings.
As for the quality of play, that’s an easier jab to make in Week 3 when teams are still figuring things out. Given the lack of urgency many of the other major team sports can show in the early parts of the regular seasons, perhaps a little patience can be accorded here as well.
The Jason Mraz NFL Shirt That’s 12 Years Too Late For Your 2004 College Hookup
Thanks to marketing forces that decided that we needed a mashup of hometown musicians and football teams in T-shirt form, we now have the My Team My City collection. Some of the selections are fairly intuitive - Eminem for Detroit, the Dropkick Murphys for Boston (er, New England), and Wale for DC.
And then there’s Jason Mraz for the San Diego Chargers. I mean, good for both of them, getting a shirt like that. The most either has done in quite a while.
Also, the New York Giants / Sinatra shirt should be a great MRA-style complement, which… might have actually been what they were going for? It’s really hard to tell with the NFL anymore.
Even Mike Mularkey Claims to be Brave Nowadays
The season’s opening weekend gave us the giddy thrill of seeing Jack Del Rio, of all coaches, blow everyone’s mind by going for two points to win at the end of regulation in New Orleans. Some people would argue that it’s statistically the right thing to do, but statheads have not reached an absolute consensus on this matter. Either way it was daring by NFL coaching standards.
This week, after the Titans lost tothe Raiders thanks in large part to a dumb penalty by Taylor Lewan in the final minute, Tennessee coach Mike Mularkey let the media know that he too would have attempted to go for two to win at the end of the game, had the Titans actually gotten into the end zone. Sure, that’s an easy thing to say in retrospect without actually having to face that decision, but there’s little reason to doubt him, other than the fact that this is Mike Mularkey we’re talking about.
At the very least, it’s nice that this seems to be cohering into the default strategy by NFL head coaches facing this situation. Now all we have to do is travel back to last season’s playoffs and let Mike McCarthy know.
Red Zone Bathroom Pass
NFL watchability ratings are generally pointless. Everyone has access to the same prime time games and their quality typically corresponds to the night they’re broadcast. Sunday night is the best, Monday night is next, then there’s Thursday night.
Instead, here’s my expectation of how many bathroom breaks you might be able to get away with during a slate of games on Sunday. It’s generally going to be more difficult during the early slate because the NFL still insists on frontloading most of their Sunday nights into the early slot.
Early early slate: Indianapolis “at” Jacksonville
Expected bathroom breaks: Three. We got us a London game. This is way earlier in the day than nature intended for us to watch football so some concessions have to be made for bodily needs. You’ll probably wake up midway through the first half, so that’s one bathroom trip right there. Ease slowly into the game, but also be sure to take breaks, because this is the AFC South, so it’ll likely suck.
Early slate: Carolina at Atlanta / Oakland at Baltimore / Detroit at Chicago / Tennessee at Houston / Buffalo at New England / Seattle at New York Jets / Cleveland at Washington
Expected bathroom breaks: One. You’re already well into the day of watching football by the time these games start so you shouldn’t need to excuse yourself too much. Plus, there are lots of games going on, some of them good.
Late slate: Denver at Tampa Bay / Los Angeles at Arizona / New Orleans at San Diego / Dallas at San Francisco
Expected bathroom breaks: Three. The downside of that extra three hours of football today is a jump start of drinking, I assume. And by now the seal is broken, so you’ll need a few more trips to the john. Try to schedule them around when you might have to watch the Rams on offense.
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