Attempting to compare the ratings of NFL and Major League Baseball games doesn’t even correlate enough to use the old apples-to-oranges cliché. It’s more like apples to cumquats, maybe.
When the NFL surpassed baseball as the national pastime — and if it didn’t officially happen during the last generation, it’s happened during the current one — it’s largely because football had television as a co-conspirator.
Football, ideally anyway, fits snugly into a three-hour window on Sunday afternoon, with a punctuation mark on the week’s games coming on ABC’s (and later, ESPN’s) Monday night marquee. It has far fewer games than baseball, and thus each regular-season matchup should carry more importance. There were — and still are — no regional cable networks carrying the games, which meant every last viewer was watching a national broadcast.
The NFL wasn’t created for television — the league and the medium didn’t become completely copacetic until after the visionary Pete Rozelle became NFL commissioner in 1960 — but it sure did become an obvious and extraordinarily lucrative marriage once they found each other.
But the NFL is seeing significant declines in ratings this season after years of dominating the fall Nielsen leaderboards. All of the NFL’s Sunday, Monday, and Thursday prime-time broadcasts are down at least 18 percent from a year ago, with similar drops in the standard Sunday afternoon windows.
The NFL has recently begun to acknowledge its concerns, and so it has become something of a schadenfreude-tinged parlor game to try to pinpoint the specific reason why this is happening now. Everyone has a theory, and many of the theories are based in a desire for confirmation of individual beliefs. No, the plunge in ratings is not primarily due to Colin Kaepernick’s protests, or because Roger Goodell’s duplicity has become a nationwide turn-off. Common sense strongly suggests that it is not one thing, but a confluence of events of various proportions that have contributed to the downward trend.
A few beyond the aforementioned: A mesmerizing presidential election that has been a boon to cable news networks, the saturation of low-quality games, technological advances like Red Zone, cable cord-cutters, too many commercial breaks, the league’s arbitrary approach to discipline, increased knowledge about the long-term effects of concussions on players, a lack of star power (Tom Brady has played three games and might be the NFL MVP so far), overall sloppy play, and . . . well, feel free to add your own theory/grievance. There are many.
The build-up to the election is of course having some effect, and probably a sizeable one, but accurate perspective on that won’t be fully available until after Nov. 8. The hunch here is that NFL ratings will begin trending upward again in the aftermath, though that will also be tied to the increased relevance of the games as the postseason nears.
Which brings us back to baseball, and the one important lesson the NFL can learn from MLB — and specifically, from the huge ratings the World Series is generating right now, at least compared with past years:
Quality matchups matter in drawing a large television audience, arguably more than any other element. Fox is seeing the benefits of this with the Cubs-Indians World Series, a collision of two franchises with long and storied histories of crushing disappointment. It’s an irresistible story played out nine innings at a time, and the appeal of this showdown is showing up in the ratings. Through the first two games, the World Series is averaging a 10.7 rating, 19 share, and an average of 18.3 million viewers. The latter number is up 23 percent from the same point during last year’s Royals-Mets World Series. It’s the highest two-game-average rating since the 2009 World Series between the Yankees and Phillies.
Cubs-Indians is an extreme example of a genuinely appealing matchup. But in a roundabout way it’s also a reminder that the NFL, especially during the regular season, transparently attempts to position unappealing matchups as important events. Was anyone, even in the home markets, anticipating Thursday night’s Jaguars-Titans game in prime time? Anyone? Do the games in London, which air on the East Coast in the morning, have any appeal whatsoever after the novelty of watching football over breakfast wears off.
The World Series, right now, is the best professional sports has to offer. The NFL, which until the recent ratings blowback has relentlessly diluted its product for greed, is something less than that.
Turns out Mark Cuban was fairly prescient, if hyperbolic and slightly off on his timing. Two years ago, shortly after the NFL announced its new television deal that, among other things, expanded the schedule of Thursday night games, the Mavericks owner offered a casual warning while talking with reporters before a game.
“I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,’’ Cuban said in March 2014. “I’m just telling you: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy.
“Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule No. 1 of business.’’
It would be an exaggeration to say the NFL is imploding. But it’s not as popular as it was in recent seasons, and it’s not so much because the pigs got fat. It’s largely because we got tired of being fed the slop.
Chad Finn can be reached at finn@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeChadFinn.
