NFL Wild-Card Ratings All Up for 1st Time in 5 Years, Still Down Compared to Glory Days
There is a saying on Wall Street that “even a dead cat will bounce if you drop it from high enough.”
As such, a “dead cat bounce” refers to the rebound stock prices tend to have the day after one of those stock selloffs big enough that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a network news anchor who’s reporting that the sky is falling and we’re all going to be in the poorhouse.
The NFL got a dead cat bounce of its own this past weekend, as all four wild-card game time slots beat their previous-year ratings for the first time in five years.
Sports Media Watch sorted through the carnage to find that not only were ratings up, but if you give the public thrilling, last-second drama, they’ll tune in by the truckload because nothing in this world compares to the edge-of-the-seat tension that playoff football can provide.
To wit, the Philadelphia Eagles-Chicago Bears game pulled an overnight rating of 22.9, the highest rating in its time slot for NBC since 1994 and the highest non-Super Bowl rating since NBC got the NFL back in 2006.
That in itself is impressive enough, but perhaps unfortunately for Bears kicker Cody Parkey, who clanged the would-be game-winning field goal off the left upright with five seconds to play, the quarter-hour rating for the last bit of the game topped out at 27.6.
That’s 27.6 percent of all televisions in America, turned on and tuned in to watch the city of Chicago get its soul ripped out.
For comparison, the Golden Globe Awards, which followed the game, pulled a paltry 12.7 overnight, down 5 percent from last year.
But let’s not pat the NFL on the back quite yet.
For one thing, that NBC comparison of “best since 1994” is misleading insofar as it was the first time NBC had aired a wild-card game in the Sunday late window since New Year’s Eve 1995.
And for another, that 22.9 is the second-lowest rating the late Sunday wild-card game has pulled since the Green Bay Packers and Arizona Cardinals pulled a 21.8 in 2010 and ratings cratered all the way to 20.4 for Carolina Panthers-New Orleans Saints last year.
The New York Giants’ game against the Packers pulled a 24.0 rating in 2017; that contest and last year’s Sunday night game were both on Fox.
The theme of “up from last year, down from the glory days” continued across the other three time slots as well.
The CBS Sunday day game (Los Angeles Chargers-Baltimore Ravens) pulled a 17.8. That’s up 2 percent from the 17.5 Buffalo Bills-Jacksonville Jaguars pulled last year but still down 7 percent from the 19.2 Miami Dolphins-Pittsburgh Steelers drew in 2017.
And while the national ratings are already in for Saturday’s games, let’s keep this apples-to-apples and stick with the overnights from those games as well.
Based on that metric, Seattle Seahawks-Dallas Cowboys, which pulled a 17.7 on Fox, was up 19 percent from 2018 but still paled in comparison to the 19.2 that Steelers-Cincinnati Bengals pulled in 2016, the last playoffs before Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests drove away many NFL fans.
Indianapolis Colts-Houston Texans pulled a 15.3 on ABC, up 4 percent from last year but still the second-lowest in the Saturday matinee slot since Atlanta Falcons-Arizona Cardinals posted a putrid 14.3 back in 2009.
And even the good news is tempered by a sense of perspective.
That Chargers-Ravens game had the big media markets of Los Angeles and Baltimore as its home territory and only beat by 2 percent a game that was primarily of interest in tiny markets Buffalo and Jacksonville.
Likewise, in both slots where the nadir was set back in the late aughts, the Cardinals were involved, and unlike in most of America, Phoenix is the kind of place where January is a fantastic time to go outside; daytime highs in Arizona routinely hover around 70 degrees with ample sunshine, hardly weather to sit indoors and watch football.
That’s a lot different from watching football in Philadelphia, Chicago or Indianapolis in the dead of winter. Sure, it was nice in Houston (70 degrees on Saturday), but the Texans trailed almost the entirety of the game, dampening fan interest.
The point of all this is that let’s not hail the weekend’s ratings as a sign that the NFL is somehow coming back from its ratings problems of late.
It might just be that last year’s ratings were so awful, fan interest having fallen off a cliff, that the dead cat that is pro football in America just hit the pavement and bounced.
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