Sports on TV: NFL viewership is rebounding … but it comes with an asterisk

The NFL remains a TV viewership … I’m out of descriptors, so lemme check my Roget’s. Juggernaut. Behemoth. Colossus. Goliath. Leviathan. It simply steamrolls everything else, and by wide margins.Just look at this past weekend’s wild-card game data. These are the sort of audience numbers for which network executives and advertisers would commit unspeakable acts to see in non-NFL programming.NFL Wild Card TV viewership During the league’s regular season, 91 of the top 100 programs on U.S. television were NFL games in 2021. That’s an almost absurd level of domination, thanks in no small part to a record number of close games and having the Dallas Cowboys back in contention.The NFL and TV networks are rightfully chest-thumping a bit, citing the league’s best audience numbers (17.1 million viewers per game in the regular season) since 2015. After the pandemic clobbered just about everything on TV in 2020, the past year was a story of gradual recovery — particularly for live sports. And the NFL was perhaps the media darling when it came to the story of people watching TV again.But there is a caveat that doesn’t get much attention: OOH.That’s industry shorthand for measured out-of-home viewing, such as at bars and restaurants. Nielsen, whose viewership data has been the TV industry’s currency used to create advertising rates since the 1950s, formally added OOH measurement to its metrics in September 2020.For NFL games, OOH viewing can add as much as 10 percent to the eyeball total, insiders say, and a bit more for big games. That’s obviously not an insignificant number of viewers.