NFL games are not short. In fact, they are quite long. In the first eleven weeks of the 2015 season, many games were actually lasting longer than four hours.
Strange as this might sound to some people, the NFL has been struggling with poor ratings, and although that doesn’t really affect the Super Bowl odds. You wouldn’t go so far as to call the NFL’s ratings bad, but they have certainly been dipping below the expected mark.
The NFL is the most popular entertainment form in the United States. Their ratings tend to dwarf every other popular source of televised entertainment several times over. Some people might be wondering why all this talk about TV ratings is even arising. And anyone making such comments clearly hasn’t been keeping up with the goings-on of football.
And that worries the NFL. This is an organization many thought was unassailable as far as popularity was concerned, and yet they have gone so far as to lose viewers to the election cycle, this at a time when some of their most exciting matches were underway.
Rumors coming out of the NFL suggest that the executives want to find new ways of speeding up games. And that matters because NFL games are actually quite long, which is odd because the average NFL game only has 11 minutes of actual game action.
This is according to a report from the Wall Street Journal published in 2010. That is startlingly low for NFL games that are so long. The problem here is simple: football games are long but they do not actually have to be.
For the most part, you are getting over three hours of commercials, replays, and half times. There’s also the replay reviews, breaks for injuries and hurdles. Why are NFL executives so surprised that their ratings are dropping?
The game they are selling isn’t that exciting, to begin with, and viewers are certainly not staying away because they find the presidential election so enticing. In this case, though, you have to commend the league for actually noticing the problem.
They have already begun taking steps to remedy the issue of excessively long games. Everyone agrees that NFL games are too long. Everyone also agrees that football games are not as good as they should be.
The pace of NFL games needs to pick up. The league needs to give viewers a reason to tune in. NFL fans commit a lot of time to watch football. So, wasting so much of their time with commercials isn’t fair; it’s a wonder it has taken this long to irritate them.
Maybe the NFL could have pursued their current game structure a little longer if Netflix hadn’t come into action, showing people that it was possible to watch television that had no commercials.
The NFL has tried really hard to brush the ratings issue aside, but they are not succeeding. People know that the ratings are a problem. Fortunately, the NFL has shown that it can be flexible. Improving football games and making them faster is a decent first step.