The NFL is back. Not that it ever left.
Regardless, the TV numbers have hit the highest levels this season since the 2015 playoffs. That was the last year before anthem protests and political controversies took a punch out of the NFL’s ratings points.
Regular-season viewership was the highest it’s been since 2015. Ditto for the wild-card round.
Via Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, the six games from the first round of the playoffs averaged 31.383 million viewers. That’s significantly more than last year’s 28.842 million average, even with one of the games exclusively streaming on Peacock.
The 2015 postseason, which had only four games in the wild-card round and all on free TV, averaged 32.6 million viewers.
Having the Cowboys, who racked up 40 million in an ugly loss to the Packers, helped. Still, the audience numbers prove that nothing gathers a live audience like NFL football. That remains true even as, to quote noted entertainment industry expert Cosmo Kramer, “the vagaries of the production parameters vis-a-vis the fragmenting of the audience due to cable television, carnivals, and water parks” make it harder and harder to get people to watch the same damn thing at the same damn time.
The NFL continues to do it. And that continues to give the NFL more value than any other media property.
