As the shadow of another quadrennial upheaval threatened to diminish the NFLWith the league’s stranglehold on American media consumption, the 2024 election cycle has had relatively little impact on the league’s television audiences.
Unlike 2016, where the NFL’s delivery fell 8% in the face of the Trump-Clinton race, this season’s numbers are flat compared to last year, with 17.8 million viewers per game. Although the NFL’s consistency can be attributed in part to a marked increase in streaming consumption, football this year managed to withstand: a) a televised assassination attempt, b) the sudden exclusion of the president in voting, and c) the general malaise that accompanies an 8% decline in overall television usage in the United States.
While politics failed to shake things up, the intrigue surrounding the presidential race largely contributed to crushing the makeup of this year’s Top 100 “shows.” (The scare quotes are there because I’ll be damned if I know how we’re supposed to refer to Amazon Prime and Netflix entries, which are complete pain in the ass, as far as taxonomy goes.)
While last year’s rankings were a monument to the NFL’s relentless need to gobble up everything in its path (Roger Goodell and the boys accounted for 93 of the 100 spots), the 2024 matchups were somewhat diminished by all the intrigue of Beltway. This time around, the NFL has bragging rights to 72 of the 100 most-watched events, well ahead of the 66 spots the league claimed eight years ago, when it also faced the Summer Olympics.
In fact, the latest tally is strikingly similar to results from four years ago, when the NFL caught up 71 of the biggest prints during the election/plague year. The league was joined in 2024 by even more competing sports properties; including four college football games, two nights of action at the Paris Olympics, the NCAA women’s hoops final and Game 5 of the World Series, sports snatched 80 of the 100 available entries. In 2020, sporting events appeared on the list 74 times, compared to 88 the year before (when the NFL earned 73 spots) and 89 in 2018. This past year, the NFL claimed a relatively modest 61 broadcasts.
As for which NFL games were picked in 2024, the list provides further evidence that the power struggle between the AFC and NFC is as balanced as it has been in years. After running roughshod over the junior division for the better part of two decades, the NFC has begun to lose ground, accounting for 28 of the year’s most-watched broadcasts compared to 23 for the AFC. (Not long ago, the NFC enjoyed a 15-slot advantage.) As cross-flexing becomes more common, interconference meetings have flourished; Year-to-date, AFC vs. NFC broadcasts have occupied 21 of the top 100 slots. Naturally, the biggest attraction among these was Super Bowl LVIII.
Speaking of which, the Kansas City Chiefs share the lead with the Dallas Cowboys with 13 appearances each, while Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens have put their stamp on 10 television windows, edging out the Buffalo Bills of an entry. The evolving rivalries between Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and the aforementioned Jackson helped fuel some of the biggest draws in the standings, as the Chiefs-Ravens AFC Championship Game scared away 55.5 million viewers, while the playoffs of the AFC division between KC and Buffalo delivered 50.4. million viewers.
None of this takes anything away from the NFC, which still enjoys a big ratings boost every time Green Bay and San Francisco (10 appearances each) take to the national stage, while the Eagles aren’t remaining with seven major television stops. NFC’s audience prowess depends in part on its geographic distribution; including the split New York and Los Angeles DMAs, the conference has teams located in each of the top five DMAs and eight of the top 10.
While it is widely believed that television is now just a delivery system for the NFL and commercials that try to get you to switch insurance providers, figures from last year suggest that at least some of the other members of the so-called Big Four can still draw a crowd in the right circumstances. Fox’s coverage of The 2024 World Series too short featured the Yankees and Dodgers, a combination of market power and star power that helped MLB securing its first spot in the top 100 since 2019. (Match 4 was just stripped of a spot, finishing two spots south of the also-denied Kentucky Derby at No. 104.)
On the other hand, the absence of LeBron James and Steph Curry during the NBA Finals hampered ABC’s style, as the league’s biggest tie (Game 2 of the Mavs-Celtics series) landed at No. 153. That was in 2019, when the last two Raptors-Warriors title games were top-50 games.
Other highlights included South Carolina’s 87-75. victory over Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in the women’s national championship game, a big draw that also happened to be college basketball’s only entry for 2024. The men’s tournament closest to crashing into the list was NC State’s ouster from Duke’s perennial draw in the Elite Eight; according to Nielsen, CBS’s coverage of the Blue Devils’ loss was the 120th most-watched sporting event of the year.
Aside from the usual non-sports outliers – the 98th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was the only non-football/non-political contender to hold a spot in the top 50 – the 2024 list was marked by the conspicuous absence of entertainment programs regular. . CBS series premiere Tracker made noise in the run-up to the Super Bowl, and while its regular Sunday night broadcasts would never reach parity with the NFL’s afternoon showcase, the drama retained much of its sampling initial.
During the first eight episodes of season 2, Tracker is television’s most-watched and highest-rated scripted show, averaging 8.2 million viewers per week live and daytime, of which 716,041 are members of the 18-49 demo. For comparison, an average episode of prime-time entertainment programming on ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox serves only 3.6 million viewers, or a total of 473,064 adults under 50.
Barring any unforeseen fits of madness, the NFL’s dominance on the field should reassert itself in next year’s rankings. As America steers the rickety tricycle of its fading dominance toward the limitless horizon of partisan disruption and endless complaining, football will once again do its job in trying to distract us from whatever government decides to do in 2025. While there is no guarantee we will see a repeat of the NFL’s monocle-pop campaign in 2023, the dispersion of cyclical election intrigue should greatly contribute to this let this happen The year’s list looks a lot more like the table we published 12 months ago.
If you are a fan of the endless political process (sick), the next general election day is in 1,404 days and you can vote in the midterms in just 669 days. In the meantime, there is plenty of football to watch.
(The title of this article has been corrected to reflect that the NFL had 72 of the most-watched broadcasts, not 73.)