Yesterday afternoon during Evan & Tiki on WFAN in New York, hosts Evan Roberts and Tiki Barber discussed the upcoming Super Bowl and the size of the audience that may tune in. Thier prediction is this game could set a new all-time record for viewers in the United State.
Roberts started the conversation by adding up all of the World Series, NBA Finals and NHL Finals numbers and realizing if you add them all up combined, you get 116.6 million viewers. While Roberts pointed out those are a lot of the same people because the series play out over several games, however, it’s still crazy to think about. Projections for this year’s Super Bowl call for the game to have over 120 million viewers, up from just over 115 million one year ago.
This led Roberts and Barber down the path of wondering if the Super Bowl would ever be a pay-per-view event. They discussed this on the same day NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked about this very subject to which he replied, “Not in my time” when asked if he can see a day when viewers would have a separate fee just to watch the Super Bowl.
It’s still something that has to be in the back of everyone’s mind after seeing a playoff game go behind a paywall for the first time. “I’ve always wondered this, and as time has gone on I think the answer has changed,” said Roberts. “If the NFL decided, forget a streaming service, if they announced the Super Bowl…was $59.99 to get it on PPV. $60 bucks a head, how many people are watching the Super Bowl?”
Barber estimated around 80 million people would pay for the game and when they did the math and the total was $4.8 billion dollars, it made them believe even more, this could happen in the future.
“If there is a sport or any event…name any event in our culture right now, that people would pay top dollar for, it’s the freakin Super Bowl,” Roberts said. “You look at every other event in our culture right now, nothing comes even close, not even in the same stratosphere as the eyeballs that will be glued Sunday at 6:30 to your television, or whatever you watch with screens now of this game. There’s nothing even close, the NFL beats the crap out of everything.”
Roberts contined, “It may go down as the highest rated Super Bowl of all-time. It’s got a real chance to be because it has all these factors that are coming together. You have a historical franchise in the San Francisco 49ers, with a big fan base. You have a burgeoning dynasty in the Kansas City Chiefs and then you’ve got, whether you like it or not, the Taylor Swift factor. When you throw all three of those things in to this cauldron you will have a rating that exceeds 120 million people…it’s insane and there’s nothing else in our culture that comes close.”
