I think blaming the protests alone is giving them too much credit. I am sure some people have stopped watching because of them. I am also sure a larger number of people were already sick of the way things are in this league and the protests were the last straw. Ridiculous referees and rule changes, the bullshit pink ribbon campaign, favoritism to a few select teams, horrible Thursday games, over saturation of the market, favoritism to the fantasy football crowd (i love fantasy but play fucking football), scandal after scandal, elimination of the off season (i don't need the NFL 24/7 365) the no fun league penalties and fines and worst of all 3 hour games featuring 2 hours of commercials. It's becoming unwatchable and increasingly frustrating. Roger hit the nail on the head when he said "they aren't losing viewers people are just watching less." It's getting harder to justify dedicating THAT much time to football when the product is suffering this much.
I think it's a case of oversaturation coupled with an inverse dead cat bounce. Your target audience is 99.99999% people who live in the United States. Once you remove those who have no interest in Football/Sport you are left with a target figure. That figure decreases through protests, weird rules and all the other variables mentioned such as lack of competition, drugs, cheating, 24/7 updates, etc... coupled with transient franchises and ofc economic downturn. You might experience a small uptick when people have more time and money to afford the distraction that is sport but I think NFL is pretty much at the peak (as a proportion of total population) of ratings share. Growing the game overseas is pretty much a non-starter as Kick off time in Europe is 7 to 10pm, 10pm into Monday morning and some godawful time after that when we're long in bed trying to get some rest for the working week. Potential fans in Tokyo have the option of watching from midnight through to till just shy of noon on a sunday and fans south of the US border for who the timezones work are probably watching 'soccer'. ***Additional*** My method of watching (UK) is via gamepass of which i was first made aware of through much advertising on the NFL website. By forking over my money for this officially sanctioned means of watching I get; Regular season games blacked out (for minimum of 24hrs) if they are on Sky. Which as they can cherry pick games means I get to miss key and intresting match-ups. All post-season games blacked out (same rules) Superbowl blacked out (same rules) Plus the controls are arse, the commercials are annoying and not really relevant to my locale and all the other awesome features you might expect like the latest soundFX, player profiles and NFL programs just don't seem to get put on there.
There's plenty of channels around so how about running the same game on two different channels - one geared to the "entertainment" viewers with all the music, cross-promotion and other extraneous bullshit and another for people who just want to watch a damn game and listen to guys who actually know the game talk about what is going on and not be afraid to "tell it like it is" when the game is turning to shit. I just haven't figured out how to filter out the excessive celebrations, those color blast uniforms or pink shit on the serious football channel.
The product has been watered down by many aspects. Thursday football, poor officiating, crappy London games, caring more about end zone celebration than player safety...etc, etc.... The bottom line is all of the issues the game have one common denominator......Roger Goodell. Every issue that fans bring up has resulted under his tenure. Owners love him because he's made them much richer, but the shark has been jumped. Player safety issues, player discipline, rules, officiating, et al.......the guy has been a walking talking dumpster fire fucking clown show except in the eyes of the owners since day 1.....this ass clown makes Woody look competent in comparison.....
So what were their excuses last year when ratings went down? Ratings has been an issue for longer than this year so if the majority say it's because of protests that they never see in the first place, they are full of shit. Bullshit like this map are why I won't be watching football this weekend. Blue is the Jets game.The majority of the East Coast gets the game, except for that small bit in South Jersey and Philadelphia. Why don't we get it? Because "NO GAME due to local team at home on FOX". Who fucking cares that there's a shitty team playing on Fox? Let me watch the damn game that should be on CBS.
