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Is This the Apotheosis of the NFL?
As the League Sees Staggering TV Ratings, Serious Questions Loom, From Safety to Labor to Technology
by Matthew Futterman
For the National Football League and its fans, there has never been a weekend more worthy of celebration.
The 2010 NFL season is likely to be remembered as the zenith for a North American sports league, the climax of 50 years of work in which all five television networks that feature NFL games have shattered records for viewership.
But the spectacle of this weekend's four divisional playoff games also comes with a pinch of anxiety. The reality is that the league's runaway success isn't likely to be repeated, ever, especially if management and labor can't reach a new collective bargaining agreement and the owners lock out the players and cancel games next season.
The NFL acknowledges that its recent prosperity hasn't tackled its nagging concerns. "All is not perfect in the Land of Oz," said NFL spokesman Greg Aiello.
There were many reasons for the NFL's surge this season. Events such as Michael Vick's re-emergence, Brett Favre's struggles and the epic collapse of the Dallas Cowboys kept the public rapt, just as a stagnant economy forced more Americans to look for cheap entertainment.
All this occurred at a moment when the competitive product, from the sophistication of the play-calling to the acrobatic thrills of the passing game, was peaking.
The NFL's 267 regular-season and playoff games have continued to be appointment television, even in an era when technology like DVR, Hulu and AppleTV have made the idea of tens of millions of people sitting down to watch a scheduled television show seem completely anachronistic. The league has also grown in popularity despite new warnings about the potentially crippling effects of repeated head injuries.
"There's this social aspect where the NFL brings everyone together," said Frank Vuono, a former NFL executive who is now a consultant. "It's the 'Bonanza' or the 'I Love Lucy' of the modern age."
This season, a rather straight-forward one on the field, will be remembered as the year the NFL crushed the rest of the American sporting landscape to smithereens. As every other sport and form of television programming struggles to retain eyeballs, NFL games are seeing improbable gains. On Fox, the size of the average audience was up 31% from 2005 and 18% since 2008.
On CBS, those numbers are 25% and 16%. On NBC, which has been broadcasting Sunday Night Football since 2006, seven of the 10 most-watched regular-season games have occurred this season, including a record 27.5 million for the season opener between the New Orleans Saints and the Minnesota Vikings. On ESPN, five of the network's top 10 most-viewed "Monday Night Football" games have occurred this season.
NFL research suggests that each weekend, a little more than 100 million people watch at least six minutes of NFL football. "America's last campfire," is what the league's chief marketing officer, Mark Waller, calls it.
Wall Street analysts agree. "There's nothing that's been on television this long that is surging the way the NFL is," said Michael Nathanson, managing director of the media and telecom research team at Nomura Securities in New York.
Nonetheless, the NFL is charting a course that will almost surely cause its audience to splinter. The league-owned Red Zone channel, launched in 2009, is pulling in viewers who want to watch every scoring play rather than entire games. A deal signed last year with Verizon Wireless makes Red Zone available on mobile phones, freeing even more fans from their couches.
The video products have come so far in such a short time—and have become so helpful for the millions who follow the games to keep up with their fantasy football teams—that NFL owners have begun to worry about ticket sales.
Total paid attendance in the NFL was flat this season, compared with last year, but season ticket sales fell 5%, according to Mr. Aiello. There were 26 television blackouts (these are mandatory when a game is not sold out within 72 hours of kickoff) compared with 22 last season. That's the most since 2004, when there were 30.
Concerns about player safety have mounted, both from doctors and legislators, and the NFL recently named a Player Safety Advisory Panel, co-chaired by Ronnie Lott and John Madden, to review everything from the rules to the equipment.
Then there's the labor situation. If the owners and players fail to agree on a new economic structure for the sport after this season, the whole enterprise stands to lose billions of dollars from fans and sponsors.
"There's probably 20 reasons why the NFL was so successful this year," said Rick Gentile, the former executive producer of CBS Sports. "Of course, watch: next year they'll go have a lockout and they won't be able to build on any of it."
When examining this exceptional season, it's hard to avoid one creeping thought: The NFL got lucky. Many of the league's most compelling narratives took place in some of its largest and most fervent markets. Mr. Favre ended up in Minnesota while Mr. Vick came to the Philadelphia Eagles. Donovan McNabb and Mike Shanahan ended up with the Washington Redskins. The Green Bay Packers were resurgent. The New York Giants were contenders for most of the season and the Chicago Bears made the playoffs. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts remained dangerous while Tom Brady's New England Patriots were the class of the league.
Like most leagues, the NFL is driven by its old-line franchises. When they do well, or in the case of this year's Dallas Cowboys, are spectacularly terrible, the league's audience blossoms. And if anything defines the past two years of growth, it's the power of those franchises. From April to December, the mainstay Steelers and Cowboys sold more merchandise on NFLShop.com than every team including the Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints.
"For several years, the balance was toward the AFC, which was some of the smaller markets and teams," said Bill Wanger, executive vice president of programming for the Fox Sports Media Group, a division of News Corp. which owns Dow Jones, publishers of The Wall Street Journal.
That led to large but largely flat television ratings for much of the past decade. Even Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports, which owns the AFC Sunday broadcast package, acknowledged that most of the league's most powerful brands and traditional rivalries are concentrated in the NFC, which generally attracts bigger audiences.
"If we ever get close, that's a big achievement," said Mr. McManus, whose season ratings were nearly even with Fox's NFC package in 2004.
According to NM Incite, a division of Nielsen Media, three teams—the Cowboys, Vikings and Giants—accounted for 20.4% of the online "buzz" this season, which reflects blogs, blog comments, message boards, groups, Twitter and video sites.
Leah LaPlaca, vice president of programming for ESPN, said her network craves the traditional, largely NFC rivalries for Monday night games. "These teams have played each other so many times during the season and the playoffs, that players seem to bring a little extra fire going in and that makes for compelling television," she said.
And for now, at least, a massive and concentrated following that's likely to be remembered as the mark of a golden era.
Pretty sure Wile E Coyote is a much better authority on that.
