Perhaps no image better exemplifies the NFL’s hegemonic stranglehold over the American imagination than that shot of a vaguely dyspeptic-looking Rob Lowe taking in the 2020 NFC Championship Game while sporting a cap embossed with the league’s logo. The actor’s glum endorsement of the generic—he looked like a referee who’d been going through a bad divorce—spawned a thousand memes and gave fans with more unequivocally defined rooting interests something to chuckle about at the end of a long season.
Oh, how we laughed.
As it turns out, the guy who played the saxophone in St. Elmo’s Fire may have been onto something. While his choice of headgear at first blush seemed as goofy as the film that made him famous—toward the end of St. Elmo’s, Demi Moore tries to end her life by sitting in front of a drafty window—Lowe’s topper proved to be eerily prophetic. Cheering on individual teams is for the white belters; the world is the NFL’s dojo and the rest of us are just paying good money to stink up the aikido mats.
Tortured martial-arts metaphors aside, 2023 was the year the NFL swallowed our collective frame of reference. Per Nielsen, the league accounted for 93 of the year’s 100 most-watched TV broadcasts, an improvement on 2022’s already impressive tally (82) and a huge leap forward compared to the 61 slots the NFL commandeered just five years ago. If it’s widely accepted that TV is now merely a delivery system for live sports and insurance commercials, last year’s deliveries suggest that the rest of the so-called Big Four leagues have been remanded to a shadow tier.
With three college football games thrown into the mix, 2023 marked the first time a single sport registered in the top 100. Basketball just missed the cut, as CBS’ presentation of the San Diego State-UConn title tilt was the year’s 101st most-watched broadcast. The ponies also had a good run, with NBC’s coverage of the race segment of the 149th Kentucky Derby claiming the 106th spot, while the NBA notched its biggest draw for Game 5 of the Heat-Nuggets Finals (No. 120). The concluding round of the 87th Masters Tournament landed at No. 131, while Game 5 of the World Series earned bragging rights as the year’s 140th most-watched televised event.
Outside of the usual non-sports outliers—the State of the Union Address and the 97th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were the only non-football outings to crack the top 50, while the Academy Awards clawed its way back into TV’s upper echelon—the 2023 list was marked by the conspicuous absence of regularly-scheduled entertainment programming. The fifty-sixth season premiere of CBS’ flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, was the highest-ranking non-sports program (No. 136), while the lone scripted highlight of the strike-blighted fall season was CBS’ encore presentation of the Yellowstone pilot, which fell just shy of the top 200 with an average draw of 6.83 million viewers. For the sake of comparison, that repurposed Paramount+ IP scared up 3.1 million fewer viewers than the LSU-Iowa women’s hoops final (No. 161).
Inexplicably enough, the coronation of King Charles III drew 1 million more viewers than the Angel Reese-Caitlin Clark battle, although the latest spasm of Royalist boosterism couldn’t lay a glove on the 2018 nuptials of Prince Harry and the lady from Suits. Despite the fact that we fought two wars to ensure we no longer had to pay any attention to our English cousins’ stilted pairings-off, the wedding averaged 29.2 million viewers, good for ninth place on that year’s list. Somewhere up there in the great American empyrean, a bald eagle is weeping.
But enough already about Knifecrime Island. In a record-smashing year for the NFL, one in which the overall TV ratings are up 8% versus last season, a relatively limited roster of teams accounted for much of the league’s biggest deliveries. As much as Lowe would have us root for all things NFL, the Dallas Cowboys were the biggest ratings drivers in 2023. With an average draw of 25.2 million viewers per game across its 13 national TV appearances, America’s Team accounted for no fewer than 18 of the year’s 100 biggest audiences. Also putting in the work were the Kansas City Chiefs, who claimed 16 of the top slots, edging their Super Bowl LVII opponents in Philly (15). Meanwhile, the NFL’s top-rated local team also proved to be a big national attraction, as the Buffalo Bills closed out the year with 13 showings.
Lastly, while there’s still one week of regular-season action left to unfold this weekend, the Nielsen Gods may be getting ready to crown a new ratings champ for the first time in 15 years. While Fox’s “America’s Game of the Week” window has cast a long shadow over the TV landscape, CBS’ own Sunday 4:25 p.m. ET slate may steal the title as the tube’s top-ranked program once the final numbers are tabulated next Tuesday.
Through Week 17, CBS’ national window is averaging 24.992 million viewers per outing, giving the Tiffany Network a 62,000-viewer advantage over Fox. While Fox could pull ahead on Sunday afternoon, as Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen will be calling the Dallas-Washington game opposite Jim Nantz and Tony Romo’s Chicago-Green Bay duties, CBS’ hybrid AFC-NFC coverage is putting up the network’s highest deliveries since 1998.
As for the outlook for 2024, the NFL’s dominance over the field will face a challenge later in the year as the presidential election intrigue begins to come to a gentle simmer. As America steers the rickety tricycle of its fading dominion toward the boundless horizon of shouty derangement, football will find itself in the unfamiliar position of having to fight for hearts and minds and eyeballs. It’s also an Olympics year. While betting against the Shield is a mug’s game, it’s safe to assume we won’t see a repeat performance of the NFL’s monocle-popping 93/100 run when it comes time to count the house a year from now.
