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 ESPNs 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, heres where the networks finished for average viewership for this years 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 years average was its lowest in well over a decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at si.com ...
Bump.
Oversaturation and growth. The college game I grew up with is no more. Conferences swallow each other up like corporations. My schools rivalries have been purged to once every two-three year happenings.
Sadly, I could once quote every score, player, stat from my teams past 30 years and in recent years I need google just to recall who our coach is. Sure my memory isn’t what it once was, but this forgetfulness is more out of just losing interest.
Gary Pinkel is a good man, I believe he came from the Don James coaching “tree”? To a lot of the nation, it seemed as if he was run off. It did to me anyway.
Looked it up, Tim Wolfe was forced out by racist black players and BLM. I guess that means Pinkel buckled under to the PC pressure too. Not a X in the box that says strong or leader to me at all.
He just wrote this book if you’re interested. I’m not.
Actually my black and white co workers here in the deep south are rethinking letting their kids play football....These are not liberal people by no means...many were college athletes....My good friend decided to take his son out of football when 9 year olds were getting concussions.... His son loves basketball and soccer now....My black friends have their kids in soccer also....it’s just too risky....The ghetto moms from the hood don’t care....They want there baby to be in the NFL.
If Nick Saban ever lets Tide players kneel....Then that will be the very last time i watch the sport of American Football......NFL has been dead to me since Joe Montana.
You can watch the games for free on YouTube.
I didnt say it was played with a running clock. Im saying that there is time elapsed with the clock running where there is little or no action. Just like the time between downs in football. Yet they count the entire sixty minutes as action, but only count the time between the snap and tackle as action in football.
One of the peculiar things about hockey is that there's actually a rule that requires players to play the puck and keep it moving. It's a rare circumstance where you'd ever see a violation of this rule called -- it only happens if a player on one team is ineligible to touch a puck in play due to a delayed offside call or similar violation, and a player on the other team refuses to touch it while it's sitting there on the ice -- but the rules of play keep the puck in almost constant motion.
Impotently passing the puck back and forth isnt action. And again you are defining action solely as the ball in play. Shifting formations, etc. is part of the strategy of football yet you insist on discounting this time for self-serving reasons.
I’ve played hockey for more than 20 years, and I’m trying to understand what it means to “impotently pass a puck back and forth.”
There’s no reason why a shifting formation can’t be done while the clock is stopped. In fact, there’s no consistency to it at all. Sometimes it’s done while the clock is stopped, and sometimes it’s not. What exactly is the purpose of a rule where the clock stops on a play that ends with an incomplete pass, but it keeps running if the pass is completed and the ball carrier is tackled?
It means youre going to keep possession of the puck for two seconds until the other team intercepts, until two seconds after that when your team takes it back. Or the guy on the wing passes it to the guy in the center, who passes it back to the wing, who passes it back to the guy in the center. Nothing has really happened.
Im not knocking hockey, but using minutes of action as the basis of judgement is like saying one movie is better than another because it has more explosions.
Because a pass play generally is longer than a running play, and since the clock stops youre not running off time waiting for the two teams to get down the field for the huddle, nor do you want the offense unfairly being assessed a delay of game penalty. I thought you wanted more action?
Forget about "minutes of action." In football and soccer, the clock runs even when the ball isn't in play. I never understood the point of having a whistle blow, an official place the ball on the field, and two teams huddle up while the ball is sitting there ... and the clock runs.
Hockey has more action than any other 2-3 sports combined. Changing lines on the fly is unique to that sport, and the puck changes possession so many times that it isn't even coached as a "possession" game -- but as a "transition" game.
I'd love to see the NFL stop the clock at every whistle -- even if it means shortening the game to four 5-minute or 8-minute quarters.
Running the clock through whistles makes no sense in a game that is played in intermittent stages by design.
Only 30-45 percent of clock time in rugby is ball in play. How long is a track meet, and how much actual event time takes place? Youre rationale is apples to oranges. Kind of an ADHD standard. Gotta have constant motion or youre bored, even if that motion doesnt really get you anywhere.
How long is a track meet, and how much actual event time takes place?
You're actually making my point. A track meet isn't a single event; it's a series of independent events that are timed (or measured) meticulously. Nobody would take a track event seriously if the clock started running while the competitors were still getting set up on the starting blocks.
Gotta have constant motion or youre bored, even if that motion doesnt really get you anywhere.
Not at all. I can watch a baseball game without getting bored. The rules of the game are designed for a leisurely pace. I can even watch curling, dude. LOL.
My point is that a track meet shows that using time in play is a dumb way to judge whether a sport is dull or not. They dont even time many events, like discus, shot put, long jump, etc.
I get it, you dont like gridiron football. But saying its dull because the time in play is a small percentage of the total length of a game is like saying hockey is dull because theres not much scoring.
As we all know, when The Mississippi State University does well, College football does well. When The Mississippi State is down, College football is down.
Now that we got rid of that deadweight Dan "Always Looking for a Job after getting his ass pounded by Bammer" Mullen, and picking up the hottest assistant coach in America in Joe Moorhead, and with 18 starters returning in 2018, look for The Mississippi State University to rightfully take its place among the National Championship contenders.
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