The NFL will spread its games out across more days of the week than ever before this upcoming season.
With the league’s schedule fully released, it’s now official that the league has added a handful of new standalone windows outside of what fans are traditionally accustomed to. It’s a trend that has continued throughout the past several years.
New this season, the league will kick off on a Wednesday, add a game on Thanksgiving Eve, play more international games than ever before, and even carve out some additional national broadcasts later in the season from games that would’ve typically been played on Sunday afternoons. The result is an NFL schedule that is more spread out than ever before.
The changes have called into question one of the key tenants of prior NFL scheduling: scarcity. Part of the reason the NFL has become so popular is because it is only available at certain times throughout the week. Fans schedule their Sundays, Thursday nights, and Monday nights around watching the league. But by adding games throughout the season on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, is the league jeopardizing that scarcity in the name of eking out a few more bucks?
That question was posed to NFL executive vice president of media distribution Hans Schroeder during a recent conference call. And the short answer from the NFL? The viewership has been stronger than ever, no matter how many days of the week we’re playing.
“I think you look across the games and the landscape and the schedule, and certainly it’s evolved a little bit, but the bulk of the games are still on Sunday,” Schroeder suggested. “And, again, we go back to looking at data and looking at the information that can make us smarter. We were up 10% last year. We were our highest huge season, I think, since 1989. Every one of our partners was up. So, you know, I think as we look at balancing, you know, the collective distribution of our games, we think there’s opportunities to build on that in a selective way. And we’ve seen when we do that, our fans tune in and watch it. And we’re giving more football to NFL fans is only a good thing.”
No doubt, NFL viewership continues to be strong. But the league’s strategy could diminish at least one of its core products: NFL Sunday Ticket. Google pays the league about $2 billion per year for the right to sell Sunday Ticket via YouTube TV, but the more games that the NFL carves out for standalone windows, the fewer games end up on Sunday afternoon. The result? Less reason to purchase Sunday Ticket.
Perhaps that’s a sacrifice the league is willing to make; only about 2.1 million people purchased a Sunday Ticket subscription last season, per Sports Business Journal. Most of those fans figure to be diehards anyway, likely to stay subscribed to the out-of-market package no matter what.
And so far, spreading more games out throughout the calendar hasn’t caused fans to tune out. In fact, for every additional game the league is able to put in a standalone window (attracting a near-certain eight-figure audience), that’s one fewer game stuck in a regional window sent to 15% of the country.
The strategy grows viewership in the aggregate, but only works if NFL fans continue to watch games with the same fervor as they currently do. If interest begins to wane because the NFL is seemingly on every single night of the week, that could quickly become an issue for the leauge.
For now, Schroeder is right. The data backs up the desire for more standalone games. And the NFL will continue to toe the line until it senses the threshold has been reached.
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