Mid season TV ratings soar
Perhaps the best barometer of a sport’s popularity in the U.S. are the ubiquitous television ratings, reported by The Nielsen Company. In an age where entertainment becomes increasingly fragmented across the long-tail and an individual’s time is more precious than gold, aggregate audiences and time-slot dominance have gone the way of stirrup pants and stone-washed jeans.
With a few exceptions.
The National Football League is one of the handful of products that still attracts huge audiences in real-time, a fact that has helped it garner the most expensive television rights deal for not only every American sport, but also every American entertainment property. In a word, the NFL is big business. And at the halfway point of the current season, its proverbial stock is navigating some record territory, along with that of our very own Falcons.
Did you know the second most-watched sporting event since Super Bowl XLIII was the October 25 tilt between the Cowboys and Falcons? Over 28.4 million Fox Television viewers witnessed the Falcons’ first-ever trek to Jerry World. The game was surpassed only by the November 1 Vikings-Packers Lambeau Favre Fest, which drew 29.8 million viewers.
Some more mid-season takeaways:
- An average of more than 17 million viewers watches each NFL game on television – the highest viewership at this point in a season in 20 years.
- Each of the three networks televising NFL games has shown an increase in viewership vs. 2008.
- NFL telecasts are averaging more than double the viewership of the combined average of non-NFL primetime programming on the big four broadcast networks since the beginning of the NFL season (8.3 million viewers on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC).
- The NFL 4:15 PM Sunday national game on CBS and FOX is averaging a combined 23.5 million viewers (up six percent from last year) – making the 4:15 PM window on the two networks the most-watched program on all of television this season.
- NBC Sunday Night Football is the most-watched show in primetime since the NFL season began with an average of 19.5 million viewers (up 22 percent from last year).
- ESPN Monday Night Football is the most-watched show on cable this TV season with an average of 14.6 million viewers (up 18 percent from last year).
- NFL games account for the top six and eight of the 10 most-watched sporting events since Super Bowl XLIII.
Given the country’s current economic climate and scarcity of discretionary entertainment dollars, the participation – both through the broadcast airwaves and game attendance – is surely encouraging. It’s certainly come a long way since the short-lived DuMont Television Network paid the NFL a paltry $75,000 to televise the 1951 NFL Championship Game between the Los Angeles Rams and Cleveland Browns – the first coast-to-coast broadcast of an NFL game.
I’ll check back soon with some notable Falcons-related television and radio numbers…turns out the Falcons are ascending to unprecedented heights this year on the airwaves.


