Preseason TV ratings may be a fairly cloddish metric with which to forecast the success of the upcoming NFL season, but with just two weeks to go before the 2022 campaign officially gets underway, the league is already making short work of its competition on the track, pitch and diamond.
If the latest batch of Nielsen live-plus-same-day data is anything to go by, America’s addiction to the NFL—and, by extension, our collective lust for folly—knows no bounds. On Sunday night, Fox’s coverage of a scrimmage between the Baltimore Ravens and Arizona Cardinals served up 3.22 million viewers and a 2.0 household rating, making it the week’s most-watched, highest-rated sporting event while laying waste to everything in its path.
While starting/star QBs Kyler Murray and Lamar Jackson were sidelined and in their civvies, the Fox broadcast proved irresistible enough to give the NFL bragging rights over the summer ratings race. Not only did the Ravens-Cards walk-through top the season’s most-viewed MLB game to date—two weeks ago, Fox’s second Field of Dreams stunt (Cubs-Reds) averaged 3.1 million viewers—but it eclipsed just about everything else on the dial as well. During the broadcast week that ended on Aug. 14, the primetime NFL exhibition beat out USA Network’s NASCAR Cup Series race from Richmond (2.56 million viewers), while throwing a long shadow over the first game of ABC’s WNBA playoff coverage and NBC’s second weekend of Premier League play.
Dallas’ 89-79 road win over Connecticut scared up 795,000 viewers in ABC’s Sunday afternoon slot, while on the previous day, NBC’s coverage of Arsenal’s 3-0 bruising of the recently-promoted Bournemouth averaged 774,000 viewers. Closer to home, the Fox NFL scrimmage delivered nearly 11 times the audience that ESPN was able to achieve with its Friday night MLS telecast, an LA Galaxy-Seattle Sounders draw that eked out 296,000 viewers.
The Ravens’ 24-17 win in Phoenix marked a 49% increase over the year-ago Chiefs-Cardinals game, good for a net gain of nearly 1.1 million impressions. Over the first two weeks of the preseason slate, live NFL telecasts are averaging 1.6 million viewers per game, up 8% versus the analogous period in 2021. Bear in mind that the vast majority of these preseason games, or 16 of 18, were carried by NFL Network, which reaches 56.6 million US TV homes, or about 22 million fewer than ESPN and nearly 40 million shy of the league’s broadcast partners.
Those figures don’t include the 5.48 million souls who braved the Raiders’ 27-11 win over the Jaguars on Aug. 6. NBC’s presentation of the annual NFL Hall of Fame Game now stands as the summer’s 10th most-watched sporting event, trailing only ABC’s sextet of NBA Finals broadcasts—the Warriors-Celtics series maxed out at 14 million viewers during the deciding frame—as well as Game 6 of the NHL Stanley Cup Final (5.82 million), the MLB All-Star Game (7.51 million) and ESPN’s Home Run Derby (6.02 million).
That so many people would choose to monitor the NFL preseason action speaks volumes about how deeply the league’s hooks are embedded in the American psyche. It’s one thing for a bunch of glorified practice sessions to draw a larger crowd than each of the 93 nationally televised regular-season MLB games that have aired so far in 2022; after all, baseball is increasingly a local phenomenon, and the real heavy lifting is done at the RSN level. It’s another thing altogether for the deciding game of the NHL championship series to edge a fundamentally meaningless Raiders-Jags scrimmage by a mere 334,000 viewers.
Of course, it’s certainly possible that many viewers tuned in to last week’s Ravens-Cardinals exercise in order to start getting their wagering mallards in a row before the season kicks off in earnest. Baltimore has been the focus of a frenzy of preseason betting activity, as Caesars Sportsbook reports that the Ravens are the most heavily bet “over” pick on the win-total market, with a whopping 98% of the handle having decided that Jackson will guide his team to more than 9.5 wins in 2022. It’s also possible that a decent chunk of Fox viewers bet on the scrimmage itself, although risking your hard-earned cash on such a thing may be charitably interpreted as a cry for help rather than a sporting wager, even if Baltimore is now 19-2-1 against the spread over its last 22 preseason games.
While neither Jackson nor Murray suited up for the outing, both QBs were the object of a good deal of in-game chatter on Sunday night. Early in the first quarter, Fox reported that the Ravens’ front office had offered its field marshal an offer that was said to be more generous than Murray’s own five-year, $230.5 million extension. Jackson, who is representing himself, is in the final year of a rookie contract that will see him earn $23 million this season, and he is said to be after a fully guaranteed deal similar to the one Deshaun Watson landed in Cleveland.
A two-time Pro Bowler and the league’s 2019 MVP, Jackson aims to have his extension ironed out before the Ravens head up to New York to face the Jets in their Sept. 11 openers. Later that afternoon, the Cardinals will make their first national appearance of the season, as they host the Chiefs in CBS’ national broadcast window, while Fox will counter with the 122nd installment of the Packers-Vikings rivalry. Baltimore will have to wait a month before taking the national stage on Oct. 9, when it takes on AFC champs Cincinnati on NBC’s Sunday Night Football.