Posted on 12/27/2017 10:55:34 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
The decline of NFL viewership has rightfully been one of the biggest sports media stories of the past two years but less has been written about where college football stands in aggregate viewership. College football is a tougher game to analyze for ratings experts given a number of factors including the innate regionalism of the sport, and the massive number of national windows between ESPN’s multiple networks, Fox and FS1, CBS and CBSSN, NBC and NBCSN and others.
One of the best analysts at making sense of sports television and digital ratings is Austin Karp, the assistant managing editor of Sports Business Daily. Last week Karp examined the 2017 regular season viewership for college football and found that CBS, ABC, NBC and ESPN all posted significant declines this season. Fox was the one outlier, with record-high viewership thanks to its new Big Ten deal. Karp said ratings were not available for conference channels like SEC Network, Big Ten Network and Pac-12 Network.
Per Karp, here’s where the networks finished for average viewership for this year’s CFB regular season:
CBS: 4.951 million viewers, down 10% from 5.489 million in 2016.
ABC: 4.203 million, down 18% from 5.097 million.
Fox: 3.625 million, up 23% from 2.951 million.
NBC: 2.742, down 3% from 2.814 million.
ESPN: 2.155 million, down 6% from 2.300 million.
FS1: 819,000, up 4% from 743,000.
Some interesting thoughts from Karp in the piece: CBS's SEC package was the most-viewed individual package for the ninth straight CFB season, but this year’s average was its lowest in well over a decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at si.com ...
Not the minor league for me, its the ONLY league.
Quite the opposite. Gary Pinkel “took a knee” with them. The next day he announced he had cancer and was retiring.
“Usually, college football radio announcers are far superior to their TV counterparts.”
Well, yes, they have a much tougher job creating a visual image without a TV image. I remember listening to baseball games on the radio as a kid. The announcer told a thrilling tale along with the roar of the crowd when the `crack’ of a solid hit was heard and the whole stadium went wild. Just wasn’t the same with TV.
It used to be”our students” are better players rhan your students.
Now it’s our head coaches can squeeze athletes into a mickey mouse degree and also can recruit the best athletes so we will win and get more money for the school and the coach can get a better more lucrative gig somewhere else.The school gets more students and gets richer...It has become a total farce..
There should be a junior college where athletes can go...learn how to be a citizen...and just play sports...and if they’re good enough to be a pro...then go..
Yeah I got turned-off to college football while I was in college. Members of our school’s team were committing long lists of felonies, which were basically getting hushed-up and contained on-campus. I got mad that some jerk who threw a pizza delivery guy down the steps received a four-game suspension when I would have been expelled and been rotting in the County Jail.
Sounds like FSU!
The Florida Criminoles!...............
I’d prefer not to name the school for obvious reasons.
We had everything from pizza guys being hurled down stairwells to a female cop being thrown over the hood of her squad car (seriously injuring her back) to an injured player attacking his roommate with a crutch and busting-up his face. One player was widely known to have committed a rape that got pled down to a wrist-slap (he went on to become a color analyst on national TV games).
And that was decades ago. With today’s prevalent thug culture it has to be a thousand times worse.
All sports are down as far as viewership, NBA, MLB, NFL and NHL. Something happening culture wide, with the millennial crowd their attention span is 2.3 seconds and group achievement is just not valued or revered anymore. It’s YOU getting the high score on Candy Crush or YOU winning in World of Warcraft or YOU showing and getting likes if you are a 19 year old girl showing your breasts on Instagram. It’s a shift in the culture. Throw in you have basically 5 programs coveting all the 5 star recruits and have their programs on cruise control and the other 105 college programs just can’t compete. The Big 5, Oklahoma, Clemson, Alabama, Ohio State and now Georgia. 4 of those schools are joke academically and a farm system for the NFL.
“it’s still a pretty dull game at it’s core when you consider how little action there is in a three-hour broadcast.”
Yeah, because there’s so much action in a nine inning baseball game, or a three hour tennis match, or a four hour round of golf. And soccer, don’t get me started. The thrills never stop!
“Sanchez dribbles the ball, kicks it to Rodriguez, back to Sanchez, back to Rodriguez...”
Not with Fox, however.
These guys got greedy, especially the conferences. The number of games on exploded too.
Seriously, though ... I'd look at baseball much differently than the other sports. The games rules are written in a way that clearly makes it played to a whole different pace. Same with golf. Neither of these sports sells itself as an action-packed, exciting game. But the NFL does -- which is a total joke.
Your argument is a total joke.
It’s a joke because the clock running is not synonymous with “action.” Yet by the self-serving definition of hockey and soccer fans the whole running time of the game is considered “action,” but substitutions, changing formations, men in motion, and extra points in football are not. Endless and fruitless passing back and forth, the goalie waiting for his teammates to get ready before inbounding the ball/puck, the puck gliding down the ice until icing is called all count as “action” but only the time from center snap to tackle gets the same definition in football.
“The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.”
Robert A. Heinlein
The running clock in soccer is one of the dumbest things in sports. Football and soccer share that one stupid characteristic -- where the clock runs even when there's a stoppage in play and nothing is happening on the field at all.
Agree...
Ex-jocks, not journalists.
Howard Cosell had an issue with this too.
Coattails from the NFL protests. People have decided they can do without pro football and are starting to realize they can do without college football as well.
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