By Anthony Crupi, Sportico
It’s one of the rare weekends on the U.S. sports calendar when the NFL takes a back seat to other sports, but if the annual scouting combine doesn’t necessarily send the Nielsen dials spinning, the televised event is still integral to league’s bottom line.
Last year’s combine averaged a six-year high of 251,000 viewers across the NFL’s linear TV and digital platforms, a turnout that included 390,000 NFL Network viewers for Saturday afternoon’s skill-position showcase. While Saturday’s numbers marked a healthy 19% improvement from the year-ago draw of 329,000 viewers, the combine deliveries were eclipsed by what might be charitably characterized as niche offerings.
Among the telecasts that beat the QB/WR/RB segment of last year’s combine were Aston Villa’s 3-2 victory over a since-relegated Luton Town on USA Network (416,000), NBC’s coverage of the men’s slalom at the Stifel Palisades Tahoe Cup (403,000 viewers) and the third round of the Cognizant Classic on Golf Channel (411,000).
And those were just some of the sporting events that went head-to-head with the combine. In primetime, a LIGA MX match on Univision (Cruz Azul vs. Guadalajara) averaged 978,000 viewers, while ABC won the programming day outright with its NBA matchup (Nuggets-Lakers, 3.05 million).
This year’s combine audience numbers won’t be made available until late Tuesday.
If these are apples-to-pineapples comparisons—even Bill Belichick probably can’t sit through four hours of three-cone drills, 40-yard dashes and hand-size measurements—the combine’s relatively unspectacular ratings are an anomaly for a league that has made a mission of overshadowing everything else on the TV dial. For example, the first round of last year’s NFL draft averaged a three-year high of 12.1 million viewers, a figure that includes the 11.6 million fans who tuned in via ABC, ESPN and NFL Net. The TV deliveries were four-and-a-half times what TNT scared up for Game 3 of the Knicks-Sixers NBA playoff series (2.57 million), which aired opposite the draft.