Nevius: Pondering reasons for sports’ ratings decline

We all said it. As the COVID-19 virus shut us down for weeks and then months, we all made the same request:

Can we please bring back sports?

Cooped up, bored and watching the Korean baseball league, for God’s sake, we were ready to embrace sports as the perfect pandemic panacea.

And then, the more we thought about it, we decided it was bigger than that. Sports are part of the tradition and culture of this country, doggone it. It wouldn’t just be entertaining to get games going again. It would be essential.

It certainly took some contortions to get it done. The NBA players lived in a bubble. Baseball cut the schedule by 100 games. The NFL essentially eliminated the preseason.

But they did it. They brought back sports.

And now no one is watching.

That’s not literally true, of course. There is an audience for all the sports. It is just a lot smaller.

That’s according to the only metric we have, TV ratings. Because obviously no one is tracking ticket sales in empty stadiums. And the news is, television viewership is down across the board.

And it is a pretty big board. You’ve probably heard the NBA and NFL are off, but it isn’t just the mega-sports. Per USA Today, hockey’s Stanley Cup Finals were off 61%. The Kentucky Derby lost nearly six million viewers.

And the money sports took a hit, too. Game 1 of the World Series this year averaged 9.2 million viewers, making it the least-watched World Series in history, according to Sportsnaut. The NBA Finals were down 49% and the NFL season is off 13%, according to the New York Times.

What happened?

There’s a school of thought from the shut-up-and-dribble crowd that fans have been turned off by the political activism in sports. That kneeling for the national anthem or wearing “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts is polarizing an already divided country.

That seems pretty far-fetched. First, is anyone kneeling before NFL games? Or are they kneeling and TV isn’t showing them? Either way, it is hard to get incensed about something that you don’t see.

And second, what was wrong with the way the NBA handled the playoffs? They were COVID-conscious, staying in their bubble, and their protests were thoughtful and respectful. I never heard anyone say, “I’d watch the NBA, but that Black Lives Matter decal on the floor makes me so mad I change the channel.”

I’d suggest a different reason. The NBA playoffs were a snooze. All-hail LeBron James ― four rings with three different teams is an accomplishment. But he and his Lakers did have a pretty sweet glide path through the playoff rounds.

They routed poor Portland, which was down to nine players after star guard Damian Lillard hurt his knee. They only needed five games to knock off Houston, a flawed team that lost its coach and GM after they were eliminated.

They beat happy-to-be-here Denver, which did the Lakers the favor of eliminating the Clippers. And then they won the championship by beating Miami, a fifth seed, who saved the LeBrons from having to play dangerous Milwaukee.

So the Lakers didn’t have to face the Clippers or Bucks. Nor, by the way, did they have to worry about the Warriors, who were injured and out of the picture. All in all, it was not a playoff run for the ages.

Also, the NBA was going up against pro football. The NFL is still the king of ratings, which is why a dip makes the guys in the front office nervous.

The thing is, first we just wanted to see some football games. Now we have games everywhere, all the time. Who hasn’t had the experience of scrolling through channels and saying, “There’s a football game on now?”

The coronavirus has made it even crazier. The Kansas City vs. Buffalo game was supposed to be on a Thursday night. It was postponed until the following Monday with a weird west coast kickoff at 2 p.m.

This is where the NFL is headed, despite warnings about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Pandemic or not, NFL owners want more games on more nights in a longer season.

Ratings have steadily fallen, but the league has doubled down. Thursday Night Football, for instance, is not popular with fans or players. Richard Sherman once called it a “poopfest” because of the risk of injury from playing two games in five days.

Too many games drag down ratings and turn off fans. If I was the NFL, I’d look at over-saturation of the product instead of tweets from players.

And there is one more set of numbers we need to examine. All those viewers that sports lost had to go somewhere. They did:

Fox News average viewership is up 63%.

MSNBC is up 38%.

And CNN’s average viewership is up 172%.

Maybe that’s the real story. It isn’t that people are fed up with sports, or turned off by social activism.

Maybe they think this is too important a time in our country to be playing games.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius