The Ratings For This Year’s Super Bowl Are The Lowest In A Decade

This year’s Super Bowl featured a team that much of America hates and is sick of seeing in the game (the New England Patriots) matched up against a team that barely has any semblance of fanbase and hails from a city that could seemingly care less about football (the Los Angeles Rams). You also had one of the league’s most passionate fanbases (the New Orleans Saints) boycotting the whole thing in protest, an act of defiance that amounted to an entire major American city tuning out on Sunday. Couple all of this with one of the more dreadfully boring Super Bowls in memory, and it probably shouldn’t come as any surprise that the ratings for the game are the lowest they’ve been in a decade.

This year’s game was the first televised in CBS since 2016, and ad spots for the telecast were going for around $5-million.

Further, it should be noted that for years the NFL tried to break into the Los Angeles market specifically for the television ratings boost it would potentially bring, but having one of the city’s now-two teams playing in the game didn’t give it much of a boost. The 44.6 rating registered in Los Angeles was lower than the national average, showing that few people seem to care about the Rams in the team’s home city, even when they’re playing in the biggest game of the year.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, a football-mad city that is traditionally one of the NFL’s best when it comes to TV ratings…

The numbers were particularly bad here, as it was the lowest rating for any major market and the lowest-rated Super Bowl in the history of the city. Bars all across the city refused to show the game, and Saints fans, livid over the team being screwed out of a Super Bowl appearance after a blatant botched call handed the Rams a win in the NFC title game, had better things to do on Sunday, like dancing on the roofs of fast food restaurants.

It will be interesting to see if this all amounts to any blowback by NFL owners and networks against the league’s cartoon villain commissioner, Roger Goodell. It’s believed that owners and networks have been tolerant of Goodell’s forward-facing ineptitude largely because the league hasn’t experienced a major decline in revenues in recent years. It might be another thing if they start to feel it in the pocketbook.

Meanwhile, Goodell should probably stay out of New Orleans for a while.