Sports Are Officially Too Valuable, and It’s a Big Problem

All that’s left when it comes to TV ratings is sports, and that’s rapidly becoming a problem.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged for the past 15 months, everything is now altered forever. When it comes to television, it appears the pandemic was finally the tipping point for the long-feared and much-discussed cord cutting.

With a dearth of new shows on broadcast and cable, millions flocked to streaming services for their entertainment fix. The pandemic also coincided with traditional broadcasters, like NBC and CBS, dipping their toe into the streaming wars, to battle the established Netflix and Hulu, to say nothing of premium sports streamers like ESPN+.

It’s led to the complete collapse of the television audience, to the point that broadcasters are accusing Nielsen of not properly capturing TV ratings anymore. There has to be an explanation, they believe, for the nightly audience of people watching television crashing by tens of millions since the pandemic started.

In sports, much of the ratings discussion has centered on the decline for pandemic-era events compared to their predecessors. Of course, the Kentucky Derby in September or the NBA Finals in October are not going to draw the same audiences as previous years. There was far too much attention paid to comparing sports to previous years, and not to its current competition.

That lingered into 2021 as we resume a fairly normal sporting calendar. Big events like the NCAA Tournament, The Masters, and Kentucky Derby have returned to their usual places on the calendar and the audiences largely returned. No, it hasn’t been at the same level of 2019 or previous years, but they bounced back dramatically from 2020. More importantly, the ratings for big sporting events — and even some not so big sporting events — are lapping just about everything else on television.

This past Wednesday, All Elite Wrestling was #1 on cable with its Blood & Guts show with a pay-per-view worthy main event. Due to Cinco de Mayo, it only drew about a million viewers, actually down from a couple weeks prior in total viewers. But in the coveted 18–49 demo, TNT actually beat CBS and ABC from 8 to 10 p.m.