In broadcasting, as in sports, you look at the numbers in the end. And what the NFL’s numbers for both the season and the Super Bowl ought to tell the league is this: Storylines carry the day.
Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Chiefs and 49ers brought in an average of 123.7 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It’s the highest number of people in TV history to ever watch the same broadcast. And Nielsen put the number of those who watched any portion of the broadcast at 202.4 million, a staggering 10% increase from last year. Business is good.
It certainly didn’t hurt that A.) The Chiefs were trying to win back-to-back titles, B.) The 49ers have a huge following, too, C.) The game went into overtime and D.) It was won by Patrick Mahomes, who is ascending to the top tier of quarterbacks to ever play the game.
All good. All real. But anyone who doesn’t at least partially credit the impact of the Taylor Swift angle here is either being willfully ignorant or just doesn’t understand the importance of building out as many storylines as possible — all the time.
It’s in the numbers. When Swift attended Chiefs games during the season, TV ratings shot up 15% higher in the early Sunday time slot and 9% higher in the late Sunday slot, according to a back-of-the-napkin analysis by the New York Times. Ratings were up over average for the Thursday night game Swift attended. They were up for the two Sunday night games she went to.
And there are lots of factors at play, right? It isn’t necessarily only one thing. The Chiefs just generally being a high-profile powerhouse helps, and the fact that the defending Super Bowl champs hit a rough stretch during the regular season — they lost five of eight games at one point — added drama and uncertainty.
Meanwhile, Mahomes’ acclaim as a best-in-class QB put extra spin on the idea of grabbing two Lombardi trophies in a row. If he’s going to be mentioned with Brady, Montana and others, he was going to have to do that, right?
Lots of interesting angles. But it was the Swift-Travis Kelce romance that came in out of nowhere. And while it may seem like an obvious takeaway that more storylines attract more interest, sometimes it takes an outlier — like this one — to remind us that sports broadcasts are fundamentally dramas. They may not be soap operas, but they’re really not so far removed.
The Patriots in their heyday made for consistently great ratings partly because Tom Brady was the quarterback, partly because guys like Rob Gronkowski provided either comic relief or incredible drama, partly because Bill Belichick was an almost perfect villain — a lot of things, not only one thing.
But it doesn’t have to be confined to the field of play in order to draw eyeballs and grow audience. Brady married a supermodel, remember? She created her own business empire. Then he began to work on a business empire of his own. None of that had directly to do with football, but all of it worked to the good for the NFL, because storylines compel people to watch and want to know more.
The league isn’t precisely begging for attention. Last year, 93 of the top 100 broadcast programs were NFL games. But even for the mighty NFL, progress isn’t always linear. The 2023 regular season per-game average of 17.9 million viewers was the second-highest since its numbers started getting tracked in 1995 — but its biggest TV season was actually almost a decade ago, in 2015.
As for the coming year? It’s already teed up for the league. Mahomes wants to become the first quarterback in history to win three Super Bowls in a row, which would make the Chiefs the first team to do it, too. The combustible Andy Reid-Travis Kelce pairing, of which you saw a small flash during Sunday’s game (it was a royal gaffe of CBS not to drill down on it during the broadcast), will be back on display. Kelce and Swift, we assume, will be a talking point.
And that’s just the one team. Aaron Rodgers, a walking mini-drama all his own, is supposed to play for the Jets. The 49ers, with one of the strongest fan followings in the league, will be trying to break what is now a 30-year Super Bowl drought. The Texans and their Offensive Rookie of the Year, CJ Stroud, are poised to bust out. The Dallas Cowboys’ extended post-season misery plays on a national scale.
These are all drama points, and the NFL’s broadcast partners no doubt already anticipate them. What this past season taught us, or reminded us, was the amazing value of the storyline you don’t see coming. Only a league intent on leaving money on the table would fail to capitalize on that kind of gift.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
