We did in fact see a notable decrease during week one, anywhere between five and 15 minutes fewer commercials in most games
Touchdown – commercial – extra point – commercial – kickoff – commercial.
Last year, we ran the numbers and on average, each NFL game had around 55-65 minutes of commercials. This wasn’t an increase from previous years, but the perception was that there were far more ads, a problem for the NFL. We reported that the reasons for this perception are likely twofold:
With the 2017-18 NFL season only a few weeks away, we wanted to look back at 2016-17 one more time and review some numbers on what was driving fans crazy last year.
We took a survey of 1,084 NFL fans, and mixed responses with social media trends by using tracking tools for sports-related commentary around the web, looking for trending complaints. It was pretty obvious there were two last year that drew most of the internet’s concern, but some others of course emerged as well.
There are a lot NFL fans – TV ratings suggest that over 60% of Americans tune-in on occasion throughout the season to watch games, the largest percentage for any sport in the US. But then there are NFL fanatics, who watch pre-game coverage, flip between RedZone and their favorite team’s game, keeping one eye on their fantasy football app, and then immediately turning to social media to discuss and review highlights throughout the day.
ESPN has seen steady growth over the past 50 years, with continued subscriber increases year-over-year, that is at least until recently. The entertainment sports network has seen a perplexing drop in subscribers over the past few years, and shows no signs of slowing this decline.
With the NFL draft behind us we thought it would be an appropriate time to run a Fan Optimism Score™ survey to determine what teams’ fans are most excited about the upcoming season, and what fans are already on their proverbial fourth drink before the season has even seen its first kickoff.
We wanted to see what states had the most valuable sports teams, so we pulled data on individual team values for the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS and added them together in each state. You can see the full value of each state’s sport teams in the map and graph below:
A million here, a million there.
Professional sports contracts can seem massive, no matter the league, but we wanted to see what sport often ends up paying out the most in their top deals, especially relative to total league revenue. While the NFL has been a dominant force in US sports for the past decade for total league revenue, it was interesting to see how low their top 10 guaranteed contracts are compared to the NBA and MLB.
For some teams, it’s part of the strategy, take a lot of swings, don’t worry too much about striking out, the resulting hits will balance everything out. Others, they just don’t have the power to really take successful cracks at the ball.
We wanted to see what teams average the most strikeouts on offense per game, so we pulled data on the past five seasons (2012-2016) to determine who ended up walking back to the dugout empty-handed the most. Below you will find a breakdown of average strikeouts per team over the last five seasons, and a chart below that shows the five year average of every team as well.
Among the several issues the NFL has faced in the press over the past few years, none have been as impactful as concussion data.
We wanted to see which NFL teams had the most concussions during games and which teams had the least. Using data from NFL injury reports as well as cross-referencing with third party NFL data providers, we broke down each team’s total reported in-game concussion count below.