Through the first two weeks of the regular season, the league's premiere game, NBC's "Sunday Night Football," is down 12% in viewership compared to last year; ESPN's big game, "Monday Night Football," is also down 12%; and CBS' first "Thursday Night Football" game fell a whopping 26%, according to Nielsen data.
Even with these declines, the NFL is still bigger than most everything else on TV. Through two weeks, NFL coverage on all networks is averaging 18.3 million viewers. To put that into perspective, the season six finale of "The Walking Dead" brought in around 14 million viewers.
But that average is still down from 20.1 million viewers over the same time frame last year, which is concerning to networks and anyone else banking on the future of linear TV -- because if the NFL isn't immune to ratings drops, what is?
Billie Gold, vice president and director of programming research at Amplifi, the global buying arm of media company the Dentsu Aegis Network, said it's the lack of big games and prominent names that has sacked the league the past two weeks.
"This season there have been fewer marquee match-ups early on, while some prominent NFL superstars are missing from the limelight," she said.
And not every NFL broadcast has seen a decline. CBS' second Thursday Night Football game on Thursday night between the Patriots and the Houston Texans was up 4% from the same game last season. And Sunday games, which represent the bulk of the schedule, have seen smaller declines -- the ones broadcast on CBS are down only 5% while ratings for Fox's Sunday games are roughly unchanged from last season.
On top of the quarterback problem, the NFL is also competing with the presidential election, which has brought in big viewership for the last year.
The Wall Street Journal reports the first presidential debate between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump on Sept. 26 is expected to reduce ratings for ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and multiple ad buyers are predicting TV viewership in the range of about 10.3 million to 11 million people for the game. That would be down 15% to 20% from last year’s average Monday Night Football rating.
ESPN, majority owned by Walt Disney Co., already took a hit on advertising pricing because of expected competition with the debate coupled with a weaker game matchup, according to people familiar with the matter. The game is the lowest priced of any Monday night for the 16-week NFL schedule, the people said.
When Trump and Mrs. Clinton duke it out across networks that night, ad buyers predict viewership for the debate may be up anywhere from 20% to 50% from the 67 million people who watched Democratic incumbent President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Gov. Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate in 2012.
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