Posted by John Vrooman on Thursday, October 27, 2016 in National Football League.

Interview with CBS. 

I am looking for commentary on the NFL’s ratings decline.  Have the media companies paid too much for the broadcast rights in recent years and are now paying the price?

Sports TV Bubble

Yes the artificial sports TV bubble may not have yet burst, but it has sprung a considerable leak, particularly for the oversaturated NFL packages. The digital media revolution has given an irrational artificial demand but it is now taking it back, and the media giants are left holding the bag.

The primary source of the sports media rights fees explosion was originally massive advertising dollars being funneled into sports programming as the last bastion of live TV as a result of digital media unplugged. All sports media share this common cause for the right fees explosions in recent long-term contracts, but the NFL is particularly vulnerable to boomerang structural damage from technological revolution.

The vertically integrated NFL cartel may have effectively outsold its own product which may indeed be declining in popularity among unplugged digital media users. The demand for traditional NFL programming may have also deteriorated as a reflection or adverse reaction of internal governance failures on the recurring if not chronic issues of spousal abuse and player concussion syndromes. This is particularly true for the newest demographic of women fans.

In the name of competitive balance, the quality of the NFL game itself has also deteriorated into the random mediocrity of equally bad teams beating each other. Traditional media fan bases have suddenly shifted from devoted fans of traditional football to newer less traditional fantasy fans who could care less about the quality of the games themselves, or the performance of any team other than their own fragmented fantasy squads.

V