(
)
Pro baseball and basketball lie concussed, unable to get a make on the league that has blitzed their television ratings, sacked all the sponsorship bucks and driven deep into a nation’s sporting red zone.
That’s the one, officer, they say, pointing toward the National Football League, which is too busy counting its millions to pry the big chunks of stitched rawhide and orange rubber from its cleats.
Fresh off its best television ratings in 15 years, the NFL is something more than pigskin and pomp. It’s the cultural reference point that goes beyond income, politics and all the other stuff that’s dividing the country.
The TV surge is driven by big markets; New York, Chicago and Boston all have double-digit jumps in local television share for NFL tilts over 2009. It’s helped that all the teams in those markets were competitive this year, but there’s lots more to the linebacker-sized ratings than just big-game matchups.
In an entertainment landscape of nearly infinite choices, where there may yet be a cable channel devoted to naked curling, the NFL mass appeal defies fragmented audiences, grabs viewers by the fistful and says “watch this.”
The NFL Network’s pitch is a command: You want the NFL, go to the NFL. America, more than ever, has responded: Sold.
The Jets-Steelers AFC Championship Game earned the best ratings in 24 years, with nearly a third of households in top markets tuning in. Even the craptacular Arizona Cardinals against the San Francisco 49ers Monday night game Nov. 29 had double the viewers of the next-highest rated cable program that night.
“The NFL regular season is now just an advent calendar for us, and we all can’t wait until Christmas, which is the Super Bowl,” says Professor Robert Thompson, who teaches about television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
The Nielsen ratings cover this: The Super Bowl last year was the most-watched in television history, and this one figures to break another record, providing share numbers not seen for any programming since the days when there were four channels and rabbit ears.
“We’re far away from the era when we collectively watched the same thing on TV: The Super Bowl is the last thing standing,” Thompson says.
Also helping football’s dominance — it’s not just for men anymore. The NFL attracts more female viewers than any other sport, adding nearly 1.5 million more women watching an average game last year compared with 2006, Nielsen says.
The proliferation of high-definition televisions, meanwhile, has made watching football at home more exciting.
And watching at home, or even in a bar, is less expensive than more forms of entertainment these days — football is the recession’s great equilizer.
Then, of course, there’s the spread.
“Gambling’s a lot more important for ratings than people ever give it credit for,” Thompson says. “The NFL’s a sucker’s bet because there are so many moving parts to each game — in baseball it’s easier to bet based on the matchups.”
There’s no sport marketed more smartly right now; NFL is spread across four television networks and carpet-bombs fans across all channels. It’s hyped by a rabid on-line community that dissects every draft choice, personnel move and questionable home movie.
It’s built top quarterbacks and defensive players into product-selling juggernauts who outshine starlets and make trite sound bites into charming old saws. Peyton Manning seems more trustworthy than your Dad.
Ratings go up around the country because in the NFL, parity isn’t parody like in baseball. Revenue sharing and a hard salary cap give every team a chance to win on the smarts of their coaches and management. Even a losing team like Seattle won a playoff game this year.
Many see Joe Namath’s Jets upset championship in 1969 as the catalyst for NFL interest because that game — and its bookend with the Giants ruining the Patriots’ perfect season in 2008 — hammer the idea that anything’s possible, so you better darn watch.
In a world where politics are so divisive that people can’t hold a rational conversation, where the economy has roughed up budgets and split us all into winners and losers, maybe the new tentpole that lets all of us gather and drop the labels is a football game and a big spread on Sunday.
“It helps that the party comes at a point in the calendar when everyone’s given up their New Year’s resolutions, too,” Thompson says. “But the NFL has transcended the game itself.”