David Kahn, Columnist

NFL Ratings Slide Doesn't Mean We've Reached Peak Football

As professional and college games saturate the market, and millennials cut the cord, some drop-off should be expected. But the league is still in far better shape than its rivals.

October 27, 2016 at 1:45 PM UTC

By David Kahn

David Kahn has been general manager of the Indiana Pacers, president of the Minnesota Timberwolves, head of the Oregon Stadium Campaign for Major League Baseball and is currently teaching two courses on sports economics at New York University.

Chin up, Honey Badger.
Photographer: Christian Petersen/Getty Images

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Television ratings for the National Football League were down by about 11 percent through the first six weeks of this season. There have been several theories as to why, including the presidential race, the Cubs' run to the World Series, cord-cutting by millennials and players protesting the National Anthem. But many sports and media analysts say the problems run deeper than just this fall: that we are witnessing a tipping point in NFL popularity.

Hardly. What’s truly astonishing about the NFL’s ratings is not that they’re down -- it’s that it took years of such dedicated “piling on” by the league for these numbers to even modestly dip. There is no other form of entertainment that could do what football has done over the last decade: add layers upon layers of additional telecasts, at all hours of the day and days of the week, and maintain its spell over the American television viewer.