Donald Trump’s tweets calling for the firing of “son of a bitch” NFL players that kneel during the national anthem in a protest to bring attention to police brutality and racial inequality have been followed up by a large swathe of tweets explaining that NFL ratings are down. Mostly, as he seems to put it, because the game is “boring” now, and because of protests driving away patriotic fans. It turns out that, in Week 3 at least, the ratings were up bigly.
According to the New York Times and Pro Football Talk, Monday Night Football was up 3% from the same game last year, and 7% over last week, which is translated from a 9.8 share over 7.3 last week. Last year, the first four MNF games averaged a 6.5 rating, which was during election season.
…NFL attendance and ratings are WAY DOWN. Boring games yes, but many stay away because they love our country. League should back U.S.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017
Great solidarity for our National Anthem and for our Country. Standing with locked arms is good, kneeling is not acceptable. Bad ratings!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017
CBS enjoyed a four-point gain across the network’s games, and the pregame show had its highest rating in seven years. NBC and FOX were reportedly down, but the week as a whole was up three percent from last year. This ties into research from the New York Times which concluded that only three percent of people who no longer watch NFL games like they used to was because of player protests.
The data also suggested that cord-cutting, streaming, piracy, and hardcore fans becoming casual fans contributed to the ratings decline (Red Zone, the greatest invention ever also may have something to do with it), so it seems that fans are not actually leaving in droves, but we’ll see how the ratings do next week.
(Via Campus Sports)
