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The Super Bowl ratings say a lot about up-and-down 2017 season

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Super Bowl LII featured a number of eye-popping statistics.

The 1,151 total yards was a Super Bowl record, as was the 874 combined passing yards, the 613 total yards by New England and the 505 passing yards by Tom Brady. Heck, the Super Bowl even set a record for most extra-point attempts missed in a game with four.

But the statistic the NFL and its advertisers were most concerned with did not come anywhere close to setting a Super Bowl record.

Preliminary ratings from the nation’s top 56 measured TV markets showed Sunday’s game had an average rating of 47.4. That’s down 3 percent from the 48.8 overnight rating for last year’s game.

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Last year’s game delivered 111.3 million viewers on Fox, which was slightly less than the 111.9 million for the game on CBS in 2016.

Sunday’s game earned a 70 share. The rating represents the percentage of all U.S. households that watched the game. The share represents the percentage of households watching the game among only those households that were watching TV at that time.

Based on the overnight ratings, Sunday’s game would be the lowest rated Super Bowl game since 2010, when the New Orleans Saints defeated the Indianapolis Colts.

Based on the preliminary ratings, Sunday’s game is on track to be the eighth highest-rated Super Bowl ever. The highest-rated Super Bowl was three years ago, when New England edged Seattle. That game earned a 49.7 rating and a 72 share, with an estimated viewership of 114.4 million viewers.

It’s probably not that big of a surprise that Sunday’s ratings were down, considering the NFL’s overall average ratings were down by nearly 10 percent this season. That marked the second consecutive year of double-digit declines in ratings.

Speaking to reporters last month, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell tried to minimize worries over the league’s declining ratings.

“We always want ratings to go up, but we’re 37 of the top 50 shows, which is higher than ever,” Goodell said.

Still, the decline in viewership impacted the NFL’s bottom line this season. The NFL saw its ad revenue decline by $30 million, from $2.45 billion in 2016 to $2.42 billion in 2017.

Some of that decline was the result of the league having to provide “makegoods” to advertisers in the way of refunds or free advertising in other programming.

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Despite the decline from a year ago, Sunday’s Super Bowl is likely to be the most-watched program of the year, and it will also fall somewhere among the 10 most-watched TV shows of all time.

But while the Super Bowl will always draw big numbers, the league’s popularity and viewership in the regular season is what drives the NFL’s economic machine.

No matter what the commissioner says, you can bet the league’s owners will be expecting something to be done to win back the fans the league appears to be losing at a significant rate.

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Scott Kelnhofer is a writer for The Western Journal and Conservative Tribune. A native of Milwaukee, he currently resides in Phoenix.
Scott Kelnhofer is a writer for The Western Journal and Conservative Tribune. He has more than 20 years of experience in print and broadcast journalism. A native of Milwaukee, he has resided in Phoenix since 2012.
Location
Phoenix, Arizona
Languages Spoken
English
Topics of Expertise
Media, Sports, Business Trends




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