I’m not gonna beat around the bush here. I hope the NFL and Amazon have gone and made some sort of offering to Taylor Swift because I can’t think of a programming stunt that has ever been more necessary for one of the league’s primetime games than the pop star dropping a trailer for her new album in the middle of Thursday Night Football last week.
My all-time favorite sketch from Mr. Show is called “Swear to God.” It features Bob Odenkirk playing a foul-mouthed televangelist named Rev. Winton Dupree. He delivers a sermon that includes the line “Now, The Lord said ‘I am the light of the world’. Now, he could as easily have said ‘I am King Shit of F*** Mountain! Why would you f*** with me?’”.
Change “The Lord” to either “the NFL” or “Roger Goodell,” and I would bet good money that it accurately describes the feelings inside the NFL office when it comes to their media rights.
Thursday Night Football has been the fissures in the dam this season. I am all for leagues embracing streaming services, but come on. Mad Dog isn’t alone. Plenty of people have complained about the games being exclusive to Prime Video.
On top of that, we were going into the Saints’ visit to Arizona on a string of genuinely bad games. The previous two weeks had given us a combined single touchdown. Thursdays were fast becoming a repository for football with less flavor than that Russell Wilson sandwich.
Any other week of any other year, maybe Amazon could sit tight. The company could be comfortable knowing that at the end of the day, even if Thursday Night Football is a big steaming turd, it is still NFL football. That is usually good enough.
But this wasn’t any other day on any other year. On October 20, 2022, sports fans had options. A lot of them!
The only option was to bring out the big guns and there are few guns in the entertainment world bigger than Taylor Swift.
The teaser trailer for her Midnights album was excellent. Sure, Swift is talented and attractive, but the sheer amount of “what the hell is happening right now?” energy in that video montage is quintessential to what makes her so fascinating to her fans – both diehard and casual.
For the first time in three weeks, the social conversation surrounding Thursday Night Football was not confined to “what a shitty game!”. Amazon needed to create some buzz. The NFL needed some proof that choosing Prime Video for this package wasn’t a mistake. Taylor Swift met both needs.
Remember, Thursday Night Football was coming off of its least-watched game of the season. The offensive explosion the Saints and Cardinals provided was nice, but really it was a nice bonus. Amazon was going all in on the Swifties for that extra rating juice!
It’s a strategy that made sense too. There is historical precedent for thinking it would work. How many times has ESPN used a blockbuster movie from Star Wars or Marvel to juice the Monday Night Football numbers? I know that I happily sat through a turd of a game between the mediocre Eagles and less-than-mediocre Giants in 2015 waiting for a new trailer for The Force Awakens.
Gamblers and diehard NFL fans are the only ones the league can count on anymore to watch a football game just because it is a football game. These networks pay so much to broadcast a suite of NFL games every season. They are right to demand viewership hit a certain threshold and we are right to point out when it doesn’t. I don’t blame the NFL and Amazon for pulling out a programming stunt to bolster the audience in the midst of a truly unwatchable run of Thursday Night Football.
Football fans took to social media to do plenty of bitching about Taylor Swift being part of their game. The NFL and Amazon saw the complaints, considered them, and then, because both are run by very smart people, promptly dismissed them.
At the end of the day, there are two ways to look at this. Amazon reported a season-low audience for the Week 7 game. Less than 8 million people tuned in.
Now, we could say “see, the Taylor Swift thing didn’t even matter!” and that wouldn’t be an unfair read. We could also say “without the added benefit of the Swifties sticking around to see this video, how much worse would the numbers be?”. Maybe the low audience justifies the former, but I think the latter is a very fair question.
The NFL doesn’t want to be a sports league. They do not want to be thought of just as football. The league’s goal is to be an American pop culture institution. So far, it has done a good job of meeting that goal. To stay there, Roger Goodell and the people that work for him have to cast their lines in a different pond. They have to catch the fish that usually swim right past their bait.
Taylor Swift isn’t just that bait. She is the bait, the hook, the rod, the reel, and the boat. I hope Amazon and the NFL appreciate just how valuable the teaser trailer for Midnights likely was for them given the current state of Thursday Night Football.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
