Maybe it’s because we’ve uploaded our collective memory to the numinous storage facility that is the cloud, but most of us now seem to have no recollection of the time before the NFL became the all-consuming phenomenon that it is today. The weird thing is, it wasn’t all that long ago—20 years, to be precise—that American Idol was drawing nearly twice as many viewers as the league’s weekly primetime showcase.
This really happened. Bowing on Jan. 17, 2006, Season 5 of Idol averaged a now unfathomable 30.52 million viewers per night over the course of its 41 episodes, deliveries that would overshadow ABC’s 36th Monday Night Football campaign. Before punting the rights to cable sibling ESPN, the broadcaster’s 17-game farewell tour averaged 15.98 million viewers, or 52% of the crowd Fox whipped up on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Other network shows that eclipsed the NFL’s deliveries that season include the police procedural CSI, which averaged 25.08 million viewers during its sixth cycle on CBS, and ABC’s Sunday night potboiler twosome Desperate Housewives (22.15 million viewers) and Grey’s Anatomy (19.74 million). And while NBC’s Sunday Night Football would eventually bury its primetime competition, that mass interment didn’t happen overnight. Not until the 2011-12 broadcast season, or Year 6 of SNF, did NBC’s NFL juggernaut tamp the dirt down over the last pretender. With an average draw of 20.69 million viewers, SNF became the first sports program to win the Nielsen primetime title, a feat NBC has repeated in each of the successive 13 seasons.
All of which is to say that the NFL’s whole hegemonic-stranglehold thing is still a relatively novel phenomenon. Just as Idol rapidly devolved from a star-making machine (Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood were among the contest’s first winners) to a weird afterthought—the victors from the final seasons of the Fox era are virtual anti-memes; if you can recall the names “Lee DeWyze” or “Nick Fradiani” without Googling them, you’re related to them—there’s no guarantee that the NFL’s stay atop Mt. Awesome will last forever … or even into the 2030s.
These are the sort of things Roger Goodell is going to have to think over before he summons the NFL’s media partners back to the table. The commish should have plenty of time for pondering, as the revisitation of the league’s rights deals probably won’t happen for at least another year.
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About that. A few weeks ago, Goodell went public with his thoughts on the NFL’s desire to accelerate the renegotiation of its media rights, raising the possibility that the league and its partners could “sit down and talk … as early as next year.” While the primary opt-out clause in the contracts kicks in after the 2029-30 season (Disney’s window opens after the 2030-31 campaign), network sports bosses were quick to confirm that they’d be ready to hash out new configurations, like, yesterday. Since Goodell first floated the prospect of a 2026 sit-down, NBC Sports president Rick Cordella and Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks have responded with enthusiasm, with both execs saying they’d be ready to get down to business whenever the signal flare went up.
Flexibility on such matters is a function of the NFL’s unparalleled reach. In a recent appearance at a conference staged by Puck and MoffettNathanson Research, Shanks said Goodell’s interest in a fast-tracked opt-out didn’t catch anyone at Fox off guard; as he put it, “there are things in your core portfolio where you’re willing to talk about an extension at any time.”
Cordella’s stance is in line with Shanks’, and both are about what you’d expect to hear from anyone who’d just as soon remain in the NFL’s good graces. When the bell rings, you roll up your sleeves and get to work.
That said, there are reasons to suspect that the NFL’s media contracts won’t be revisited as soon as next year. Earlier this month, Hans Schroeder did his bit to clarify Goodell’s statement, telling Puck’s John Ourand that the commish’s comments may have been somewhat “misconstrued.” In a podcast appearance, the NFL’s chief media executive took pains to emphasize the conditional element of Goodell’s earlier comments, saying, “I think he said it could be as early as next year, [but] I don’t think he gave a definitive [indication] that it will happen.” Schroeder went on to add that his team will be “ready whenever our partners want to talk.”
If none of that sounds as if a command is likely to be issued from on high within the next 13 months or so, that may be because the NFL is going to have its hands full with a number of other issues in the near term. Presumably, any extension of the existing contracts or a contiguous addition of a new package—the expansion of the NFL’s international series all but cries out for a streaming behemoth to bid $1 billion per year or better for a shot at owning a standalone overseas slate—would be further enriched by the ratification of an 18th week of regular-season games. But that can’t happen without the cooperation of the NFL Players Association, which is currently under the command of an interim leader in David White.
As Goodell recently acknowledged, the NFL won’t be ready to renegotiate its labor contract with the players’ union until a permanent executive director is appointed, and that’s not likely to be worked out until next summer. At that point, discussions about adding an 18th game can begin … and only after that matter is resolved will it make sense to convene the legacy media partners (and a host of would-be newcomers) for a serious going-over of accounts.
Which isn’t to say that the eventual meeting of the minds won’t be colored by at least one seismic upheaval, as the YouTubes and Netflixes flex their zillion-dollar market caps in a bid to unseat one of the NFL’s loyal TV partners. The amount of money these disruptors-cum-media lords will fling around in order to get their paws all over fans’ data will be obscene, and the owners will want to wallow in it like hogs in the yummiest slop.
When Goodell and Schroeder huddle with Bob Kraft to draft the media plan for the next how-many years, they may want to revisit the lessons of the last 20 seasons, an era that saw the NFL lay waste to the whole of entertainment television thanks in large part to a delivery mechanism that prioritized reach over all other considerations.
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While nobody’s suggesting that the NFL is about to go the way of Idol v. 1.0 runnerup Justin Guarini, who went from co-starring alongside Clarkson in a 2003 romantic comedy to lending his voice to the cat burglar character in something called SuperKitties: Su-Purr Charged, the league’s onward and upward trend will only continue if the old school TV partners are allowed to hold onto the lion’s share of the Sunday games.
As much as Prime Video has done an exemplary job of its Thursday Night Football stewardship, the fact remains that Amazon’s future-proofing of a largely uncherished secondary window has coincided with a decline in overall reach. Season-to-date, TNF is averaging 14.85 million viewers, good for a 12% boost compared to last year’s deliveries, and while that’s nothing to sneeze at, the streaming numbers still haven’t matched the turnout from the first years of the joint CBS/NFL Network windows. In 2015, the two TV outlets combined for an average delivery of 17.5 million viewers per game, topping the first year of their collaboration (16.8 million) and setting the high-water mark for the series.
Trouble is, CBS wasn’t making any money on TNF, and by 2016, the network began sharing the package with NBC. That solution held sway until Fox was pushed into the rotation in 2018; before long, nobody on the linear TV side had much use for the Thursday games, and the NFL sold the package to Amazon. And while the streaming platform has demonstrably aged down TNF—per Nielsen, the median age of Prime’s NFL audience is now 48.5 years old, significantly younger than the NFL’s current TV crowd (56.1)—the gains among less-wizened fans have been made at the expense of overall reach.
It’s a tradeoff, and obviously one that Amazon’s annual $1.1 billion rights fee goes a long way toward justifying. And streaming is clearly gaining ground, with Peacock and other digital platforms now accounting for nearly 10% of all Sunday Night Football impressions. It’s not an apposite comparison, given that some 20 million viewers each week are still consuming SNF via the NBC broadcast flagship (in terms of TV viewers, Prime’s deliveries are limited to fans in the two local markets), but that’s sort of the point. Peacock is additive to the Sunday night window, whereas locking TNF behind a paywall has helped boost share among adults 18-34 at the expense of a more robust crowd of fans 50 and up.
With that in mind, the best result would be to retain CBS, Fox and NBC in the all-important Sunday slots that have made the NFL the single most valuable programming asset in the U.S., while carving out a new passport package for a digital interloper. That way, nothing of value will have been lost, the owners will get richer still, and Big Tech may continue to collect on the (somewhat) voluntary forfeiture of whatever’s left of our privacy. Win-win-win!
Shut out any of the established TV partners, however, and the NFL may well be flirting with an American Idol situation. Google “William Hung” for a taste of what happens when everybody stops thinking straight.