The vast majority of you will have to go to work Monday, as the day after the Super Bowl is not yet a national holiday. It will be a holiday, of sorts, for some. Super Bowl Monday gives us the first peek at the TV ratings for the annual game, television’s biggest event of the year. This year’s version is a cold hard lock to be the largest television audience in Super Bowl history. Thank you Taylor Swift. To be fair, this year’s version probably would’ve been the biggest audience with, or without, Swifties. For one, last year’s Super Bowl had already set the largest number and Kansas City versus San Francisco is a very sexy matchup.
Taylor Swift will help the number, but I think it would have been the top Super Bowl either way. I actually think the biggest impact Swift will have is on social media engagement. The fact so many new fans have been brought to the NFL thanks to Swift’s relationship with Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce is something not lost on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, “The fact that they are both involved in football through their relationship, that’s great.” Get ready for the Kelce-Swift duo to dominate social media Sunday.
None of this is a surprise for anyone paying attention to the NFL and the associated TV ratings. The professional football league is a TV ratings monster. In the 2023 calendar year, 93 of the 100 highest rated TV shows were NFL football games. The margin by which the NFL dominates everything else TV has to offer is borderline embarrassing to the TV world. The owners are not embarrassed, they are laughing all the way to the bank. Those owners are only going to become wealthier as Goodell has publicly aimed for $25 billion dollars in annual revenue. That is a lofty goal but I would never bet against that number.
TV ratings success isn’t shared across the board currently. Let’s start with the NBA who has had a couple of stinging defeats of late. The first defeat came Thursday night, January 26th when the much anticipated South Carolina v. LSU women’s game aired on ESPN head-to-head with a Celtics-Heat game on TNT. The Gamecocks and Tigers were watched by 1.56 million viewers, while the Heat and Celtics were viewed by 1.38 million people. A women’s college basketball game beating any NBA game, much less one played by the East leading Celtics and the currently in the playoffs Heat, once was unheard of.
It wasn’t just the ladies that got the ratings win. Over this past weekend, the first of two regular season Duke-North Carolina games pulled in 3.2 million viewers on ESPN. The Lakers at the Knicks tipped off on ABC as Duke-UNC was wrapping up and only pulled in 2.7 million viewers. That’s the current East 4-seed Knicks and the Lakers, New York City and Los Angeles, losing to two college teams. In fact, the NBA game barely squeaked by a Tennessee-Kentucky game being played simultaneously on ESPN, the Cats and Vols drew 2.5 million viewers.
Those numbers should be alarming to the NBA but not more alarming than the LIV Golf numbers from Sunday. LIV was handed a gift by California’s weather. The final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-AM was washed out by the torrential rains. LIV Golf’s Mayakoba Classic in Mexico was given a Sunday with no live golf competition and little else to choose from.
The start-up tour corralled a paltry 432,000 viewers on The CW. That was only 164,000 fewer people than watched something called Pickleball Slam 2 on ESPN later that night. More embarrassingly, 1.2 million people actually watched the replay of 2023’s final round of the AT&T Classic on CBS. Head-to-head, CBS had almost triple the viewership for a tournament that was played last year.
I get that not everyone can be the NFL but these numbers should alarm the NBA and LIV Golf. What can the NBA do to draw back in the fans that have disappeared from their TV audience? What can LIV do, beyond buying every player they can in the world top 50, to actually get people to watch their product? Those two questions are, literally, billion dollar questions. The answers are not easy and Taylor Swift, for now, is spoken for.
Ryan Brown is a columnist for Barrett Sports Media, and a co-host of the popular sports audio/video show ‘The Next Round’ formerly known as JOX Roundtable, which previously aired on WJOX in Birmingham. You can find him on Twitter @RyanBrownLive and follow his show @NextRoundLive.
