A Moment Of Truth For the NFL's Ratings Problem

By Matt Dolloff, CBS Boston

BOSTON (CBS) -- The Patriots and Seahawks' much-anticipated Sunday night Super Bowl rematch headlines the first NFL weekend after the conclusion of the 2016 presidential election. It pits arguably each of the two best quarterbacks and coaches in the NFL against each other. It's an important game for each team's place in their respective conference standings. In terms of pure competition, it's hard to put together a better possible inter-conference matchup.

There's little reason why the television ratings for this game would not be massive.

And that, folks, is why the proverbial "moment of truth" is on the horizon for the NFL and its sagging TV ratings, a slide that has persisted for the first nine weeks of the regular season. The wide range of reasons for the NFL's ratings decline has been listed and debated to no end. Not much else can be said that hasn't already been committed to print or blasted into the far reaches of the Internet.

But the election, perhaps the most divisive and charged in U.S. history, was one of the primary reasons for the NFL's ratings decline, according to the NFL itself. A memo sent from NFL senior executives Brian Rolapp and Howard Katz to the league's Media Committee cited "unprecedented interest" in the election as one of the primary causes of the ratings dip. Monday night's Seahawks-Bills primetime matchup saw the lowest rating (7.8) for a Week 9 Monday Night Football game since 2009.

That game, of course, came 24 hours before Election Night. Now that the dust is settling, the NFL is certainly hopeful for a sharp upturn in its TV ratings. There's a good chance that the week-to-week ratings will rise for Patriots-Seahawks on Sunday Night Football, and perhaps even have a chance for a year-over-year improvement over last season's Week 9 SNF matchup between the Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals.

If the ratings remain stagnant, even for a matchup as fascinating and as rich with narratives as the Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl rematch, the NFL will lose its biggest excuse for the striking ratings decline. It will be forced to look elsewhere.

The league may have no choice but to begin lending more credence to the movement of former NFL fans who are now refusing to watch in reaction to the national anthem protests sparked by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. There's no doubt that this segment of the population exists and recent polls have shown large support for the anti-NFL movement, but its true size and effect on the ratings remains largely unknown and difficult to pin down.

Many of these fans, if their emails to this website are any indication, showed up on Election Day in large-enough numbers to win several key states that propelled President-elect Donald J. Trump to victory. There was also a growing resentment toward the mainstream media that claimed the same election-fueled ratings victories. Among the mainstream and in large swathes of citizens on social media, there was a disbelief at the election results that was strikingly similar to the incredulous attitude toward the true size of the group of fans that saw the anthem protests as a tipping point to finally turn the NFL off.

Mr. Trump blamed both the election and the Kaepernick backlash for the NFL's ratings decline in a recent campaign speech. A continued decline in the NFL's ratings, with the election now in the rearview mirror, would almost force the league to take notice.

One aspect of the NFL ratings problem that the league is already working to improve is the pace of the games themselves that have been heavily bogged down by excessive commercial timeouts, penalty flags, and replays. Rolapp recently spoke about the issue at a convention for the National Association of Broadcasters and acknowledged that the NFL could be looking into ways to speed up the broadcasts:

"Could they be shorter? Could they be better? Are replays too long?" he said. "We are constantly look [sic] at those things to make the pace of the games more interesting. ... In a world where Netflix has no commercials and consumers are used to 15 seconds of of pre-roll, is there a better way to do commercials with our broadcast partners?"

There's no doubt that the games have become less watchable with the intrusiveness of increasingly fragmented, over-officiated, and over-sold broadcasts. But is it really the overriding reason for the NFL's ratings decline? As far as an on-field product, Patriots-Seahawks offers a wealth of off-field storylines, two great quarterbacks, a strong coaching matchup, and two talented, well-coached teams. For professional football, it doesn't get more watchable than that. A poorly-rated broadcast for that game would be remarkable and revealing.

The NFL bet big with its internal rhetoric regarding the effect of the election on its ratings problem. It can no longer lean on that crutch. There remain a number of causes for the drop, but the league has insisted that the election was one of the major players. With that gone, and the best game of the year on tap for its biggest primetime slot, the moment of truth is coming for the NFL and its falling ratings.

The cause may not be definitively determined, but as the NFL is freed from the election-fueled haze in Week 10, the true reasons for the league's ratings problem may finally come into focus.

Matt Dolloff is a writer for CBSBostonSports.com. Any opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect that of CBS or 98.5 The Sports Hub. Have a news tip or comment for Matt? Follow him on Twitter @mattdolloff and email him at mdolloff@985thesportshub.com.