While the long shadow of another quadrennial upheaval threatened to diminish the NFL’s dominance over American media consumption, the 2024 election cycle had relatively little impact on the league’s television ratings.
Unlike 2016, when NFL broadcasts fell 8% ahead of the Trump-Clinton race, this season’s numbers are holding steady compared to last year’s heady turnout of 17.8 million viewers per game. While part of the NFL’s consistency can be attributed to a marked increase in streaming consumption, this year football managed to withstand: a) a televised assassination attempt, b) the sudden removal of the sitting president from the ballots, and c ) the general malaise that comes with an 8% drop in general television use in the United States.
If politics failed to change the way things are, intrigue over the presidential race went a long way toward overwriting the makeup of this year’s top 100 “streaming” list. (The scary quotes are there because I’ll be damned if I know how we’re supposed to refer to Amazon Prime and Netflix entries, which are a complete pain in the ass, taxonomy-wise.)
While last year’s roster was a monument to the NFL’s incessant need to devour everything in its path (Roger Goodell and the boys accounted for 93 of the 100 spots), the 2024 games were somewhat diminished by all the Beltway intrigue . This time around, the NFL has bragging rights with 72 of the top 100 most-watched events, far ahead of the 66 spots the league earned eight years ago, when it also had to compete with the Summer Olympics.
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In fact, the latest count is strikingly similar to results from four years ago, when the NFL took 71 of the biggest ties during the election/plague year. In 2024, the league was joined by even more competing sports properties; Including four college football games, two nights of action at the Paris Olympics, the NCAA women’s basketball final and Game 5 of the World Series, sports took 80 of the 100 available entries. In 2020, sporting events appeared on the list 74 times, up from 88 the year before (when the NFL got 73 spots) and 89 in 2018. That last year, the NFL claimed a relatively modest 61 broadcasts.
As for the NFL games that made the cut in 2024, the list provides additional evidence that the power struggle between the AFC and NFC is as balanced as it has been in years. After sweeping the junior division for most of the last two decades, the NFC has begun to give ground, accounting for 28 of the most-watched broadcasts of the year compared to the AFC’s 23. (Not long ago, the NFC enjoyed a 15-space lead.) As cross-bending becomes more common, interconference meetings have flourished; So far this year, AFC vs. NFC have occupied 21 of the top 100 positions. Naturally, the biggest draw among them was Super Bowl LVIII.
Speaking of which, the Kansas City Chiefs share the main card with the Dallas Cowboys with 13 appearances each, while Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens have put their stamp on 10 television windows, edging out the Buffalo Bills by one inning. The growing rivalries between Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and the aforementioned Jackson have helped fuel some of the biggest ties on the roster, as the Chiefs-Ravens AFC Championship Game scared 55.5 million viewers, while the AFC Divisional Playoff between KC and Buffalo attracted 50.4. millions of viewers.
None of this detracts from the NFC, which still enjoys a big ratings boost every time Green Bay and San Francisco (10 appearances each) take the national stage, while the Eagles aren’t far behind with seven television stops. important. The NFC’s ratings prowess is partly a function of its geographic distribution; Including the split DMAs of New York and Los Angeles, the conference has teams placed in each of the top five DMAs and eight of the top 10.
While it is widely accepted that television is now simply a broadcast system for the NFL and advertisements trying to get you to switch insurance providers, figures from last year suggest that at least some of the other members of the so-called Big Four still They can draw a crowd under the right circumstances. Fox’s coverage of the 2024 World Series too short featured the Yankees and Dodgers, a combination of market power and star power that helped MLB secure its first top 100 spot since 2019. (Game 4 just missed one spot, finishing two places south of the also denied Kentucky Derby at No. 104.)
On the other hand, the absence of LeBron James and Steph Curry during the NBA Finals limited ABC’s style, as the league’s biggest tie (Game 2 of the Mavs-Celtics series) came in 153rd place. The last time the NBA made the list was in 2019, when the last two games of the Raptors-Warriors title fight took place between the 50s.
Other highlights include 87-75 South Carolina. victory over Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the women’s national championship game, a huge draw that also happened to be college basketball’s only entry for 2024. The closest the men’s tournament came to crashing the slate was NC State’s elimination from the perennial draw Duke ratings in the Elite eight; According to Nielsen, CBS’ coverage of the Blue Devils’ loss was the 120th most-watched sporting event of the year.
Aside from the usual non-sports outliers (the 98th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the only non-football and non-politics contender to earn a seat in the top 50), the 2024 list was marked due to the conspicuous absence of regularly scheduled entertainment programming. . The premiere of the CBS series Tracker made some noise in the opening hours of the Super Bowl, and while its regular Sunday night broadcasts will never reach parity with the NFL’s afternoon showcase, the drama has held on to a large chunk of its sampling initial.
Throughout the first eight episodes of season 2, Tracker is the most-watched and highest-rated scripted program on television, averaging 8.2 million live plus same-day viewers per week, of which 716,041 are members of the 18-49 age group. For comparison, the average episode of ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox primetime entertainment programming serves just 3.6 million viewers, a figure that includes 473,064 adults under the age of 50.
Barring any unforeseen spasms of madness, the NFL’s dominance on the field should be reaffirmed in next year’s slate. As the United States rides the rickety tricycle of its fading dominion toward the boundless horizon of partisan disorder and endless grievances, football will once again do its job of trying to distract us from whatever the government decides to do in 2025. While not There’s a guarantee we’ll see a repeat of the 2023 NFL race, the spread of cyclical election intrigue should go a long way toward making next year’s roster. It looks much more like the chart we published 12 months ago.
If you are a fan of the endless political process (sick), the next general election day is 1,404 days away and you can cast your midterm votes in just 669 days. In the meantime, there is plenty of football to watch.
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