Super Bowl belies smaller ratings for big events

Super Bowl Sunday arrives amid the ongoing Winter Olympics and just days after nominations were announced for the Academy Awards, which will run on March 27. All three TV spectacles have historically put the "broad" in "broadcasting," attracting mass audiences for media events that became shared national experiences.

But based on Nielsen ratings, viewership for two of these events — the Olympics and Oscars — has halved, or worse, from the previous iteration, and is down even more dramatically from times when networks, and the nation, were less fragmented.

The Academy Awards, for instance, drew about 10.4 million viewers last year, compared with 23.6 million in 2020 and 39.3 million 10 years ago.

The Beijing Olympics' Opening Ceremony fell 44% from four years ago, and the average 12.3 million viewers for the first four nights were about half of the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Conversely, the recent NFC and AFC Championship Games did a ratings equivalent of a touchdown dance, averaging 49.6 million viewers, which was up 10% from last year and 16% from 2019. The games were the most watched events since (naturally) last year's Super Bowl.

The big game has the biggest audience of any event every year, and has mostly held, or in some years grown, its viewership. Last year's lopsided Tampa Bay victory drew about 93 million viewers, down a bit from the closer Kansas City win a year earlier, which was watched by about 101 million viewers. Ten years ago — not just a decade but an eon in media terms — an average of about 111 million watched two East Coast titans, the New York Giants and New England Patriots, square off.

This eon saw enormous changes in the media world. A decade ago, networks still had hits like "American Idol" (but prime-time's top-rated show was still "Sunday Night Football"). Today, TV's hits — culturally, certainly, and increasingly quantitatively — are as likely to come from Netflix as they are from network TV. Streaming has become a torrent of TV options in the last few years, as evidenced by Netflix receiving the most awards at last year's Emmys, led by "The Crown" reigning over the top categories.

The pandemic hasn't just made moviegoing go down; fans are forbidden, for the most part, at the Olympics, as China's zero-COVID policies mean negligible attendance at many venues, eliminating the infectious fan response that translates to viewers at home. The NFL, conversely, has played to packed stadiums and packed couches in front of the set — time traveling, at least for three hours on a Sunday afternoon (and, OK, Monday and Sunday and Thursday nights), to a pre-pandemic normal.

The Super Bowl's superlative hold on America is due to many factors, including that "there's so much ceremony and cultural norms and rituals" around it, said Marcus Collins, a clinical assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan. Collins, who is also head of planning at the Wieden+Kennedy ad agency in New York, added that people "like to depend around common norms, and revolve life" around them.

Other reasons, Douglas Hartmann, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota said in an e-mail exchange, include "its week-by-week, big-game structure; its connection to local town cultures and colleges and universities. And how all of this translates so well to television and that, in turn, we've built up a whole public infrastructure and media systems to ensure that this remains the case for years to come."

Beyond the building up of the public infrastructure is the building of a private one, including network TV. As much as the NFL needs networks to cement its cultural and commercial grip, network TV needs the one dependable entity that can belie today's atomized audiences to create a mass media — and mass marketing — event that scores every Sunday, be it regular season, playoffs or the Super Bowl itself.

The Olympics used to be a somewhat similar tentpole, albeit over a fortnight instead of four quarters (and a thrilling overtime, if this year's playoffs are any indication) of the Super Bowl. And while they're still relatively highly rated, they've lately failed to truly capture the country, outside of a few marquee competitions, like previous years. "It's part of a larger malaise about the Olympic movement itself that is quite troubling for Olympic advocates and idealists," said Hartmann.

There are other dynamics determining the Olympics' mundane ratings, including justifiable outrage over China's human-rights record, the early struggles of some highly hyped athletes, and the ability to catch results and highlights in real time in the virtual world of YouTube, TikTok and other online outlets. And then there's the dreary drumbeat of squabbles over judging and scandals over doping.

The Academy Awards has its controversies, too, especially as some feel ostracized by the Oscars' increasingly political nature. The NFL has its scandals, too, including concussions and repercussions over race that have only intensified after fired Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores alleged racial discrimination as well as pressure to lose games to get a better draft choice. But the league seems far from beleaguered, and is flourishing from record TV-rights revenue, fueled in part by burgeoning gambling on the games.

In a cluttered cultural landscape, people often follow the crowd, and fall out from it when the crowd does, too. "There's less people around the campfire, so there's less people around the campfire," Collins said, euphemistically speaking of Oscars and Olympics audience erosion. For the Super Bowl, however, "as long as people keep showing up talking about it, and it's showing up in our newsfeed, and it's a topic in which my friends, my community are engaging in, then I feel a need to be involved."

Comparing the big game and the Games, Hartmann said that "one is domestic and uniquely American, the other is international in both spectatorship and participation. In the case of the former, the absence of other shared events and common popular culture only make football and the Super Bowl more unique, powerful and important than ever." Regarding the Olympics, Hartmann concluded, "I fear what is lost is not only the national commonality or solidarity that can come from athletic competitions and victories, but the larger international awareness and global understanding that can, in its better moments, come with viewing and participating in the Olympic Games."

Indeed, in a nation and a world riven with divisions, there's something lost when there are fewer people around the campfire, be it the Olympic flame, the glow of a great movie on the big screen or any other cultural touchpoint. Super Bowl Sunday is great. But by definition it's a day, when we could use some sustained shared experiences to better connect with each other.