Welcome back to “The Needle,” a new ratings-focused column on Sports Media Watch that will break down the numbers, attempt to put some context behind the data, and discuss broader trends in measurement and television viewing.
Since Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its viewership estimates nearly five years ago, nowhere has the impact been more noticeable than on holidays, particularly those that are prone to large family gatherings.
That impact was not immediately noticeable when Nielsen first rolled out its out-of-home infused estimates in August 2020, a time when family gatherings were stridently discouraged. On Christmas 2020, the NFL attracted little more than 20 million viewers for a Vikings-Saints game on the holiday — the only game it scheduled.
That Nielsen botched its rollout, underestimating viewership for more than a year, did not help. One could have gone through most of 2021 believing that the out-of-home impact was fairly marginal.
The first sign of a significant out-of-home impact on holiday viewing was arguably Thanksgiving 2021, when Raiders-Cowboys became the first Thanksgiving game to top the 40 million mark (a figure that was not known publicly for weeks, thanks to Nielsen’s undercount).
A few weeks later, it became clear that out-of-home had the potential to completely transform how leagues approach certain holidays. On Christmas 2021, the NFL delivered more than 28 million viewers for Browns-Packers — not only an increase of nearly ten million from the prior year, but an audience that ranked among the very largest of the season.
That game was arguably the turning point in the NFL’s approach to the Christmas holiday, which had previously been a ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential part of the schedule.
The following Easter was the first sign that out-of-home could turbocharge even previously-underwhelming holiday viewership. Easter had long been a day associated with lower than usual ratings, particularly for The Masters — and to be completely clear, that has not necessarily changed. The difference made by out-of-home viewing is that the audience is now so large, even when the ratings are relatively low, that Easter has become a day associated with multi-year highs.
(Remember, ratings and viewership are separate measures. Ratings are a proportion of homes viewing a program in the average minute, viewership is the number of people aged 2+ watching a program in the average minute. On holidays like Easter, or certainly Christmas, there are inevitably far more viewers per home than on an ordinary day.)
Easter 2022 corresponded with the most-watched opening weekend of the NBA Playoffs since 2011. Easter 2023 corresponded with the most-watched final round of the Masters since 2018 (since surpassed by Rory McIlroy’s win this year). Easter 2024 corresponded with the most-watched NCAA men’s regional final since 2019 (NC State-Duke) and most-watched women’s regional final ever (a record that would be obliterated the following day).
Easter 2025 last weekend delivered another outsized performance as the NBA surpassed 2022 to score its most-watched playoff opening weekend since 2000. (The PGA Tour also scored a milestone audience with 4.36 million for the final round of the Heritage, the largest audience for that tournament since 2002.)
Next year, Easter corresponds with the NCAA women’s basketball national championship. The year after, the NCAA men’s and women’s regional finals. In 2028, the first round of the NBA Playoffs again, and so on and so forth.
Easter, of course, is a far different holiday than Christmas or Thanksgiving — which are either the same date, or same day of the week, every single year. That makes it easy for the NFL to create a new tradition of day-long Christmas football, as commissioner Roger Goodell said this week is the plan going forward. Over the next two decades, Easter can fall on any date from March 25 to April 25, a span potentially as early as the NCAA second round to as late as the second weekend of the NBA Playoffs. No annual sporting event is going to go through the trouble of adjusting its schedule so that it coincides with Easter every year, no matter how much of a viewership bonanza awaits.
It is worth noting that not every holiday is conducive to a big out-of-home viewing impact. July 4, which some in and around baseball have long advocated for as a showcase of the sport, pulls viewers away from their homes and to parades, barbecues and beaches. So too does Memorial Day and — to a far lesser extent — Labor Day.
Holidays like Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day and certainly Columbus Day do not generally correspond with family gatherings in or outside of the home.
It is Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and Easter where the out-of-home effect is most apparent. Some may take issue with turning what are in many cases religious holidays into sporting spectacles, but that horse has long been out of the barn. Even NASCAR, which has long skipped Easter weekend, has raced a handful of times on the holiday of late (though not this year).
One additional note on this topic is that out-of-home viewing is not a constant throughout the day. Consider what a typical family gathering is like on these types of holidays — generally early in the day to early evening, with dinner perhaps around 4 PM local time (or earlier). That is why when the NFL scaled back its Christmas schedule to a doubleheader this past season, both games took place in the afternoon. By primetime, some visitors have returned to their homes, others have gone to bed, and the day is largely done.
On the subject of holiday viewing, Goodell’s announcement this week that the NFL will schedule a Christmas tripleheader every year — regardless of the day on which the holiday falls — is again being viewed as some sort of crisis for the NBA. While NFL competition certainly lowers the ceiling for the NBA on Christmas, so long as the floor remains somewhere in the four or five million range, there is no reason for the league to take any rash action like scheduling fewer games or abandoning the holiday altogether.
Yes, every year the league will have to deal with viral tweets about how badly the NFL won the head-to-head, but the NBA deals with viral ratings digs pretty much every day of the year. There are more than enough viewers on Christmas Day for the NBA to still attract substantial audiences even with the NFL taking up most of the oxygen.
The only year the NBA really suffered was 2023, when Christmas fell on a Monday and the NFL scheduled a game on Monday Night Football partner ABC — preventing the NBA from simulcasting all five of its games on the broadcast network. The next time the league has to worry about that occurring is 2028, unless of course the NFL decides to sandbag its rival by giving ESPN/ABC a Christmas game on a day other than Monday (not an impossibility).
It is also worth noting that the common narrative of the NFL ‘taking Christmas away from’ the NBA is a bit of a stretch. In the event that the NFL did not schedule any Christmas games at all, it is not as if a majority of the league’s 20+ million viewers would watch the NBA instead. The overlap between the two fanbases is of course real, but the majority of the NFL Christmas audience consists of viewers who probably were not watching NBA games in the first place. The NFL is in some ways taking an audience that was up for grabs.
Plus: Stanley Cup, Rose Bowl, gymnastics
The Stanley Cup Playoffs is off to a rough start in the ratings, with viewership on the ESPN networks down 24 percent through Wednesday (figures for TNT Sports were not immediately available). That was frankly to be expected given a playoff field heavy on Canadian teams and light on the big market U.S. squads that typically carry the league — Boston in particular. As much as some may insist otherwise, leagues do not and cannot rig the results to ensure what is best for American television.
One sign of how difficult the early postseason has been is that viewership declined on viewer-rich Easter Sunday — with none of ESPN’s three games getting to the million mark. By comparison, the F1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, which preceded the NHL games, had 1.5 million.
When the Sugar Bowl attracted nearly 16 million viewers at 4 PM ET on a workday (15.8M), it may have been a fait accompli that the College Football Playoff would finally revise the schedule for its New Year’s Day bowls. The Rose Bowl’s insistence on a 5 PM ET start meant starting the Sugar Bowl so late that only night owls could make it to the end. The 2024 edition did not end until after 1 AM ET and averaged 18.4 million viewers. To say the least, 18.4 million on New Year’s is a far less impressive figure than 15.8 million on the afternoon of January 2, when many are already back in the workplace.
Women’s gymnastics is clearly more popular than men’s, and ABC is a bigger platform than ESPN2, but it is rare to see the same sport in back-to-back windows have such a massive disparity in viewership — 1.0 million viewers for the NCAA women’s gymnastics nationals on ABC, followed immediately by 107,000 for the men’s edition on ESPN2. Ten times as many viewers watched the women as watched the men.
There was once a time when male gymnasts were media stars. ESPN voice Bart Conner, who worked the men’s nationals last weekend, has IMDB credits in the 1986 film “Rad” and episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Highway to Heaven” — and however hokey those shows may seem now (or even at the time), they were incredibly popular. The late Kurt Thomas (not to be confused with the bruising Knicks forward) starred in “Gymkata.” For some sports fans, the first exposure to the name “Roethlisberger” came from Olympian John, not quarterback Ben.
Somewhere along the line, men’s gymnastics fell so far out of the popular culture that last weekend’s audience was actually a step in the right direction — as the men’s nationals were not even on Nielsen rated television a year ago.
