Eleven years ago, the Patriots and Seahawks met in an all-time classic Super Bowl that still ranks as the highest rated of the past 40 years.
One might ask how that is possible, as the Super Bowl seems to set a new record every year. But all of those records are for viewership, not ratings. While ‘ratings’ and ‘viewership’ get used interchangeably, they are distinct metrics. Viewership is a raw number that will tend to rise with population growth and is highly susceptible to methodological changes. Ratings, on the other hand, are a proportion of television homes, and as such have the effect of ‘adjusting for inflation.’
That 2015 Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl had a 47.5 rating. No Super Bowl since has come all that close — Patriots-Falcons in 2017 had a 45.3 — and only three previous ever did better. It is the only television program (much less Super Bowl) from the past three decades to rank among the ten highest rated in television history — alongside the series finale of “M*A*S*H,” “Who Shot JR?,” “Roots” and Nancy vs. Tonya.
But officially, Patriots-Seahawks averaged nearly 13 million fewer viewers (114.8M) than last year’s Super Bowl rout between the Eagles and Chiefs, which ranks as the most-watched Super Bowl of all-time (127.7M).
Why? Back in 2015, Nielsen viewership estimates were based solely on the company’s in-home panel. Today, those figures include out-of-home viewing (and less significantly, “Big Data” from smart TVs and set-top boxes).
By comparison, household ratings by definition do not include out-of-home viewing. In the household ratings, which are the closest that one can get to ‘all things being equal,’ Patriots-Seahawks beat last year’s Super Bowl by 14%. If Nielsen was using today’s methodology in 2015, let there be little doubt that the game would rank well above all others.
With all of that as preamble, it is fair to expect Sunday’s Patriots-Seahawks sequel to officially rank ahead of the original. It may even surpass last year as the most-watched Super Bowl on record. But it is highly unlikely that there will truly be more people watching this year’s matchup of Drake Maye’s Patriots and Sam Darnold’s Seahawks than in 2015.
Unlike that 2015 matchup, which pit perennial contender Tom Brady against the defending Super Bowl champions, this year’s Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl is a matchup of young teams that were not expected to make it this far. Maye is in just his second season; Darnold had been written off long ago after a disastrous run with the moribund Jets. The Super Bowl in recent years has been dominated by star quarterbacks and pop cultural figures; simply put, there are none in this year’s matchup.
Maybe one day the stars of this year’s game will be the biggest names in football, even some of the biggest names in pop culture. But today, this is a Super Bowl light on ‘known quantities.’
NBC’s Mike Tirico, calling his first Super Bowl, said in a conference call previewing the game that the lack of familiar names “in some ways makes the job easier, because you get to tell people’s stories.” He brought up his first Super Bowl assignment, Rams-Titans on ABC in 2000. “I was so excited to be a part of the Super Bowl, and it becomes St. Louis against Tennessee. They go, ‘wow, that’s the Super Bowl matchup?’ Turned out to be one of the great games; the Kurt Warner story gets told every year and is inspirational.”
The Super Bowl, Tirico said, will always produce a compelling story. “No, it’s not Mahomes, and no, it’s not maybe some of the other bigger brand name teams and the stars of the league that we see on a regular basis on commercials — but you probably will soon, because somebody will make a name in the Super Bowl.”
Tirico’s predecessor in the NBC booth shared a similar story earlier in the week. “Thursday Night Football” voice Al Michaels recalled on the “Fitz & Whit” podcast this week that prior to his first NBC Super Bowl assignment in 2009, his boss Dick Ebersol was “going crazy” over the presence of the Arizona Cardinals. “I said, ‘Dick, relax, it’s the Super Bowl,’ People don’t wake up in the morning and go, ‘Hey, Zelda, the Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl, let’s go to the movies. They don’t do that, Dick.”
Indeed, the Super Bowl is the Super Bowl. A large portion of the audience enters completely unfamiliar with the teams and players, no matter who they are. And it is hard to imagine football fans who followed the regular season and playoffs tuning out because of the matchup (New Orleans fans in 2019 being a noted exception).
But the matchups do matter at the margins. Despite what the official viewership figures show, the audience does not just grow exponentially; there are ebbs and flows along the way. This year would seem more likely than most to produce an ebb.
As evidence, just look at the viewership figures for the conference championship games; the Patriots’ win over the Broncos was the least-watched AFC title game in four years, and the Seahawks’ win over the Rams was the second-least watched conference title game overall since January 2020. And that is despite the Nielsen methodological changes — an expansion of out-of-home viewing to cover the entire lower 48 states and a shift to “Big Data + Panel” — that have generally benefited sports viewing over the past year.
The Super Bowl will probably be more resilient than the championship games, but it does not seem trivial that the first test of these teams’ drawing power resulted viewership at or near multi-year lows.
Realistically, all the changes Nielsen has instituted — and continues to roll out — make it fairly unlikely that the Super Bowl viewership will decline any time soon. It may just be the case that record highs are baked in as the measurement company revises its methodology year after year, with no retroactive changes to past data. By next season, Nielsen will have likely instituted a new way of measuring co-viewing that should increase viewership even further.
And with this year’s Super Bowl on NBC, there is the wild card of the network’s Adobe Analytics-measured streaming viewership. It is NBC’s position that because it does not use Nielsen to measure its streaming audience, its combined viewership across the two measurement companies is comparable to the Nielsen-only figures reported by other networks. Fair enough.
But the last time NBC carried the Super Bowl in 2022, it got fairly creative with those streaming figures, reporting an audience of 11.2 million — well above all previous records — based on an estimate of ‘viewers per stream’ that no other network had publicized before or since. That alone could be enough to make up for any shortfall in the Nielsen-only figure.
If there was ever any year in the near future when the Super Bowl might dip, this is the one. And it will be interesting to see if all the methodological changes can make up for what would seem to be a genuine dip in enthusiasm for this year’s matchup.
— Super Bowl 60: Seahawks-Patriots (6:30p Sun NBC, Peacock, Telemundo). Prediction: 40.3 rating, 130M viewers.
