Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
Former NFL coach and color commentator John Madden thinks there is a simple reason the NFL’s TV ratings are down this year: There aren’t enough good teams.
On a podcast with the Bay Area News Group, Madden said that to have great games there needed to be two good teams playing each other and that there just aren’t enough good teams.
And, as Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban once predicted, he believes the NFL has spread itself too thin with games on Thursdays, Sundays, and Mondays.
“What happens is there are not a lot of good teams, and they have too many windows to put these games in,” Madden said. “When you think of an early-Sunday window, a late-Sunday window, a Sunday-night window, a Monday-night window, a Thursday-night window. They all want good games, and there’s not enough good teams.”
He continued, saying the Thursday-night games in particular were a problem:
“Just look at the list of teams playing. It takes two. It’s not just one good team. You have to have two to have a great game, and there’s not a lot of great games. And we’re spreading it out more and more with fewer good teams, which makes it doggone impossible to have good games. If the games aren’t good, that’s part of it. Now there are other things: the millennials, iPhone, and the stuff people do as they live differently.
“Something has to be done about Thursday-night football. It just doesn’t work. It’s not only a fan thing — it’s a team thing. It’s a safety thing. It’s a competitive thing. It doesn’t work. I know about money, and I know about business. Maybe you have to tweak stuff a little more. To help teams, maybe you get a bye the week before.”
Madden pointed to the Washington Redskins, who played Sunday night against the Green Bay Packers and then had to travel to Dallas to play the Thursday-night game against the Cowboys. Madden called that a scheduling “oops,” saying older players needed more time to recover.
This year, the NFL blamed its poor TV ratings on the presidential election, saying debates and other election coverage were distracting viewers. In the weeks since the election ended, the NFL has seen a slight uptick in ratings, but most likely not enough to draw any definitive conclusions.
Madden’s thoughts on the NFL TV ratings and more can be found here >
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