The whole thing with the NFL could have been avoided and anyone with two of their five senses could have seen that one coming. At the end of the day people don’t think of football players as employees, but they are.
They are contracted employees to various business who do mutual business together.
Which means that if they really wanted to they could tell their various employees that if they didn’t do certain things that they were told not to do.
For example, can you imagine that if you walked into where you worked and said that instead of taking a fifteen minute break like everyone else you were going to start taking forty minute long ones because you didn’t like the way some guy got treated when he wasn’t following the instructions of the police who were authorized to arrest him?
Not only would you be fired the second that you tried it but you would also likely be laughed right out of the building.
The NFL tried to act like the whole anthem thing was something that wasn’t a big deal but as it turns out it was.
People cherish season tickets and jerseys, you’ve got to get them pretty mad in order for them to get rid of them or set them on fire.
Television was down so much in this football season that there were games that were damn near cancelled due to lack of interest.
Much like 2016, NFL television viewership numbers went down again in 2017. Except this time, the viewership numbers dropped by a larger percentage than the previous year.
According to USA Today Sports, the average television audience size among the NFL’s broadcast partners — CBS, NBC, ESPN, NFL Network, and Fox — fell by 10 percent in 2017. That decline, follows an 8 percent drop from 2016.
As USA Today explains, “NFL broadcasts had an average minute audience of 14.9 million compared to 16.5 million in 2016. CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN had a smaller audience than 2016.
“ESPN, which included its streaming audience, had the lowest drop among the four networks at a 7.7% decline. Fox had a 9.1% drop, NBC dipped 10.4% and CBS fell 11.2% compared to 2016.”
While the consistent year-to-year drop in television numbers supports the argument that the NFL suffers from certain, systemic issues; such as oversaturation, too many penalties, concussion backlash, and no one knowing what constitutes a catch.
The fact that viewership fell by an even larger amount in 2017, a year where politics and anthem protests were far more pervasive than in 2016, suggests that the anthem demonstrations are making an already serious problem, much worse.
