ratings Page 6 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

NBA Ratings Nosedive Proves Sports Are Not Essential

Televised sports are entertainment — just like video games, Netflix, and pornography. The industry serves no other practical purpose in society. Farmers produce food. Builders produce homes. Professional athletics deliver fucking Mitsubishi commercials and $19 stadium beers and an irrational sense o...

Fighting for Social Justice Sparks Ratings Surge for WNBA

No other sports league has been more vocal against inequality and systemic oppression than the WNBA....

The NFL Is Just The NHL With Better Paint

For years and years, those within the NHL offices have wanted to get rid of fighting. It’s been a given that fighting and the mayhem connected to it, as limited as it’s become recently, is one of the many factors that has kept hockey from a larger audience. It’s also pretty much agreed that it has n...

Browns Even Suck At Cutting A Player Who Threatened To Kill Their Fans

The Cleveland Browns were unbelievably bad in their 24-19 loss to the Denver Broncos. Worse than Jets losing to Dolphins bad. Coverage sucked. Play call sucked. Clock management sucked. And not for the first time this season. Or even the second time. With 3:23 remaining on the clock, down five poin...

The Crappiest Super Bowl In Memory Also Did The Crappiest Ratings In More Than A Decade

Super Bowl LIII did huge viewership numbers, relative to all other non-Super Bowl American television events. But relative to other recent Super Bowls, New England’s dismal 13–3 victory over the vanishing Rams was a ratings dud, drawing the fewest households to its broadcast in recent NFL history. P...

For The Last Time: NFL Ratings Are Not Down. They're Up, Compared To Everything Else

I am once again forced to use this space to explain something that is evident to anyone who has been paying attention to the nature of the television industry over the past few years....

There Is No Evidence Whatsoever That ESPN Is Losing Subscribers Due To Its "Politics"

The Wall Street Journal went deep on money problems in Bristol today in an article titled “How a Weakened ESPN Became Consumed by Politics.” The feature, like many others that have come before, presents as a fact that the Worldwide Leader is hemorrhaging subscribers due to a perceived shift to the ...

Here’s Ron Jaworski Getting Red In The Face Over Arena Football League TV Ratings

The Soul won its second consecutive Arena Bowl on Sunday, and today the city of Philadelphia held a celebration for the champs. Sure, the Soul won a league that currently includes just five teams. But who cares! Part-owner Cosmo DeNicola said at today’s rally that Philadelphia is now “Titletown U.S....

Premier League TV Ratings Are Falling Off A Cliff, Too

You’ve no doubt heard that TV ratings for NFL broadcasts are down double digits. So are English Premier League ratings, on both sides of the pond....

Skip Bayless Is Gaining On ESPN In A Ratings War That Doesn't Matter<em></em>

ESPN’s flagship shoutfest, First Take, has long and rightly been reviled for degrading everyone and everything it touches. Until co-host Skip Bayless departed earlier this year, that didn’t seem to matter at all to its loyal core audience, which happily tuned in each day no matter how repulsive or j...

NFL Memo Blames Plummeting TV Ratings On Presidential Election, Bad Matchups

This afternoon, Darren Rovell tweeted a memo sent by the NFL’s executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp and senior vice president of broadcasting Howard Katz to the league’s “media committee,” regarding the league’s cratering television ratings, primarily for primetime broadcasts. Rolapp and ...

Report: NFL Threatens To Fine Teams If They Use Too Much Footage On Social Media

Buried in Albert Breer’s column for MMQB this morning was a nugget suggesting just how seriously the NFL is taking their declining primetime TV audiences. Ratings in the 18-t0-49 demographic have fallen between 12 and 16 percent for Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night games, and the NFL, coincidental...

Perhaps NBC Could Focus On The "Live" Part

NBC’s Olympics ratings are down 17%....

College Football Playoff Caves To ESPN, Sanity; Semifinal Games Move To Weekends And Holidays

The College Football Playoff semifinals are abandoning New Year’s Eve, mostly, after this past year’s disaster that saw ratings plummet 36% and forced ESPN to issue free make-good ads during the national championship game....

This Photo Of John Wall Will Probably Get More Viewers Than Colin Cowherd's TV Show

Last week, Sports Illustrated reported network Fox Sports 1 is ending Fox Sports Live as we know it, after the would-be SportsCenter competitor helmed by popular Canadian anchors Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole failed to live up to its lofty projections. Its viewership was never particularly commanding, ...

Reports: ESPN College Football Playoff Game Ratings Went Into Toilet [UPDATES]

Three months of annoying, Kimmel-led promos and awkward corporate tie-ins weren’t enough to keep ESPN’s college football playoff semifinal TV ratings from plummeting on a New Year’s Eve, the traditions of which have never featured watching college football at home....

Despite being available in less than half as many homes as ESPN, Univision Deportes Network destroyed the Worldwide Leader and every other sports net last night, drawing 1.6 million viewers for its simulcast of the Mexico-Panama Gold Cup match. That’s more than twice as many people as were watching ...

Here's A Thingy Tracking NBA Teams' Nerd Ratings Through History

FiveThirtyEight has a cool interactive up today by Nate Silver and frenemy of the program Reuben Fischer-Baum, calculating the Elo ratings throughout history for every team in the NBA. I’m a sucker for Elo ratings, so I love this. I’m also a sucker for the shitbag Knicks, so I pulled up their chart ...

Pro Bowl ratings were down for the fourth straight year! (They are still far too high.)...

Your Local Team’s Fanbase Should Be Dying. Why Isn’t It?

Drew Magary's Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday during the NFL season. Email Drew here....