Dropping NFL audiences have more to with the subpar product the NFL is producing these days, than it has to do with national anthem protests. The league is shooting itself in the foot via mismanagement.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2016/10/05/confirmed...
The NFL product hasn't changed that dramatically this season, and last season was an all-time record. That's not to say that the product itself isn't contributing to the decline, or to dismiss demographic shifts mentioned in a sibling comment, but rather to note that dismissing the ongoing culture-war element out of hand is foolish.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/nfl-executives-blame-confluence-...
did you hit your wife? 1 game unless the public starts getting more angry about it.
smoke weed? 6 game suspension. no no, make that 8 games. or drop 20 spots in the draft.
celebrate on a touchdown? flag and a $20k fine later.
deflating some footballs in which your team was already punished for doing so but you destroyed your cell phone and now you're making me look dumb? 4 games.
all of this and the huge cte stuff the nfl wishes would go away has turned me off to watching any kind of football at all.
so... maybe the protests? i bet a large majority of those polled still watch the nfl anyways, even as i sometimes do despite my frustrations. i know a lot of fans who don't give a shit about any of the above. they just want their team to WIN.
but the fact of the matter is, the nfl product is terrible this season. it's just not very interesting at all unless you're one of the 5-1 teams
Those are the 2 reasons I and a lot of the people I talk to have stopped watching. Subpar product on field has never been discussed. The quality of play seems he same as it has any other year (from some highlights I've seen... but I haven't watched a game so I guess I wouldn't know).
Is it a catch? This seems to change every week.
No more hits: It's good for players' health, but maybe the players should change their style of play and not go up for that super high pass across the middle and show some self-preservation rather than penalizing a defender.
Reviews: this can be reviewed but this cannot. Why? If the ultimate goal is to get it right, everything should be reviewable.
Officiating: Tumbled to terrible quality recently. Even the league, which is loathe to criticize its officials, has admitted that officials have screwed up that changed the outcome of several games. This is historically bad.
Games in far off lands: This needs to end. Now.
Preseason: Stop making ticketholders buy these worthless games. Should be 2 preseason games. NFL doesn't make the networks carry preseason games, why should season ticketholders foot the bill?
Teams moving around for money: Talk about fan alienation.
I'd be interested in knowing how these sorts of stunts play out in a more macro sense. As a whole, it may be a net profit for the NFL, but I wonder if it's more of a medium-term win.
The puritans were virtue-signallers par excellance, so that probably also flows through to what you see today.
That's the symbolism they are invoking when they kneel! They do not want to show a solidarity that they do not believe exists. That people would give up watching football over it sort of supports their side of the argument.
The short answer for why it is still played is "tradition". There's a lot of things in a lot societies that are "weird" for the same reason.
This seems a lot more fun to me than the current (awkward) practice of standing there trying to look more serious than the guy next to you, hand over heart, while some ostentatious diva who lost the last Eurovision contest belts out yet another over-dramatized and over-personalized performance.
The current incarnation of this tradition needs to die for aesthetic reasons, if not political ones.
The big problem is that a lot of star players were injured at the beginning of the season - Brady, Romo, Dez Bryant, JJ Watt, RG III, Adrian Peterson, etc. Just so many injuries this year.
And we have millennials doing a lot more online games, so we have that competition now.
The audience wants their stars.
Here's one: https://www.google.com/amp/www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/poll-m...
But yea, I'm sure it's seems like it wouldn't matter.... to people still watching.
I can see how mismanagement can influence it but ai wpuld love to hear of occurences
There is also rampant team mismanagement. The best teams in the NFL are the best teams in the NFL largely because they have competent, stable front offices and coaching staffs. Hitting on a good quarterback also helps, but isn't necessarily the key, as great quarterbacks in shitty systems can't surmount that handicap by themselves. Some teams shuffle their management every other year, routinely overpay for players, leaving gaping holes in their rosters in other areas, constantly trade away valuable draft picks for over-the-hill veterans, cut players on guaranteed contracts that then count as deadwood eating up their salary cap to no benefit, and many other examples of unsound, short-term thinking. This kind of mismanagement is crippling, because a year of two of whiffing in the draft or mismanaging the salary cap can impact a team for years down the road.