Dizzy
Footballguy
I imagine this was covered herein already, but the original panic that ratings were dropping (~2 yrs ago) turned out to have more to do with the inability to track people watching games outside of cable TV. I believe this was corrected to reveal that viewership was about the same, but people were simple watching on other devices. Can't recall the source so there may have been a lot of spinning behind those claims.
Everything has a saturation point. Eventually you hit a limit as to how many people you can get to watch/follow, anything. The acceptance and inclusion of fantasy football by the NFL and ESPN took NFL interest to never before seen heights, but that cannot be sustained. A drop-back, correction, whatever you want to call it occurs and the best you can hope for is that the backside of the curve is still well above what it was prior to the peak.
NASCAR has been experiencing the exact same thing over the last decade or so. It is nothing close to the popularity it experienced in the mid 90s to early 2000s, but it its fan base today is still far greater than it was in the 1980s.
Everything has a saturation point. Eventually you hit a limit as to how many people you can get to watch/follow, anything. The acceptance and inclusion of fantasy football by the NFL and ESPN took NFL interest to never before seen heights, but that cannot be sustained. A drop-back, correction, whatever you want to call it occurs and the best you can hope for is that the backside of the curve is still well above what it was prior to the peak.
NASCAR has been experiencing the exact same thing over the last decade or so. It is nothing close to the popularity it experienced in the mid 90s to early 2000s, but it its fan base today is still far greater than it was in the 1980s.