Ratings Tank As Philly Fans Flee TV

Its bleak times for Philadelphia sports amd fans are fleeing with their eyeballs, and Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia - which owns the TV rights to two of the worst teams in professional sports, the Phillies and the Sixers - is taking an epic TV ratings beating.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Phillies viewership has plummeted 65 percent from 2011, the last time the team reached the playoffs. Sixers viewership has nosedived 72 percent over the same period, according to Nielsen.

"We serve a passionate and loyal fan base," Brian Monihan, president of Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, said in a statement. "And while viewership can be cyclical and reflective of the teams' performance, our passion for covering them remains high."

But experts grimace when they hear of the fans' dismay, the poor Nielsen ratings, and the teams' performance, given the huge TV rights contracts with regional sports networks that guarantee a revenue stream to the franchises; the Phillies signed a $2.5 billion, 27-year deal in early 2014 to televise their games on SportsNet. The Phillies also own part of the network.

Phillies and SportsNet officials say that comparing the viewership decline between 2011 and the last two years is unfair: the Phillies won 102 games in 2011, the most in franchise history, and were a heavy favorite to win the World Series.

An average of 350,000 adults watched Phillies games that year. The team lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the first round of the playoffs and never recovered its competitive footing.

Last year, an average of 112,000 adults tuned in to the Phils on SportsNet. Through early June the viewership had improved slightly from last year to an average of 123,000 a game. The Phillies' record on Monday, going into the break for the All-Star Game, was 29 wins and 62 losses.

Dave Buck, the team's senior vice president of marketing and sales, said that the 112,000 TV viewers per game in 2014 was exceptionally low, and the 350,000 viewers in 2011 was probably exceptionally high. Average viewership over time should fall between those two poles, he said.