The first half of the 2017 NFL season proved beyond a doubt, that the NFL’s ratings crisis couldn’t solely be chalked-up to the presidential election of 2016. Writing in Pro Football Talk, Mike Florio makes the case that the second half of 2017 could be even worse for the NFL, for that very same reason.
As Florio notes, the NFL’s ratings steadied somewhat in the second half of the 2016 season because many viewers who had been distracted by the election, returned. With no such post-election bounce in the offing this year, the league’s already sagging numbers would likely decline further in the second half of 2017.
Florio writes:
With the final eight weeks of the regular season beginning tonight, there’s no reason to think this year’s troubling trend will change, because there’s no reason for people to return to following football after the various debates and town halls and other political shows and specials that sucked people away from watching football before November 8, 2016. And with, as Darren Rovell of ESPN noted on Wednesday, total ratings are down 5.5 percent through the first nine weeks of 2017 in comparison to the first nine weeks of 2016, the absence of a post-election bounce means the gap is about to get bigger.
It’s unclear what the NFL can do on the fly to avoid that. It’s unclear whether the NFL is trying to. One solution would be the aggressive use of flexing to ensure that the best games will be played in the biggest Sunday spots, rules that limited flexibility be damned.
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