Oops! Sports-Chat Shows Are a Delicious Part of a Complete Media Breakfast
A brush with metaphysics can happen just about anywhere, and at any time, but the upshot is always the same. Say you’re in the cereal aisle of your local grocery and your shopper’s gaze lands on a box of Cap’n Crunch Oops! All Berries.
Why does this thing—likely the byproduct of some sort of grim and calamitous industrial accident—exist? What is the purpose of this seafaring delivery system for sugar, and do the “berries” shred the roof of your mouth like the vaguely pillow-shaped nuggets in the canonical brand do? And why did anyone at Quaker Oats think that “Oops” was a reassuring word to plaster all over a box of things that are meant to be eaten?
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TV works the same way. If you haven’t thought “why is this a thing?” while watching a morning cable sports gabfest, you’re not asking the right questions.
It was either Ludwig Wittgenstein or L.C. Greenwood who first looked at Skip Bayless and his Snoop Dogg-bequeathed Death Row chain and said, “Wait: what? Why?” And while maybe nobody can answer those questions, there’s a parallel line of inquiry that can be resolved to the satisfaction of all. Why is his FS1 show, Undisputed, a thing? What justifies the existence of all this ante meridiem caterwaul, which includes, but is not limited to, First Take, Get Up, The Herd and the aforementioned, and soon to be relaunched, Bayless vehicle?
As president of insights and analytics for Fox Sports, Mike Mulvihill has a unique perspective on the sports-chat phenomenon. On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the launch of FS1, Mulvihill says the studio shows helmed by Bayless, Cowherd and Nick Wright “now represent about a quarter of all the viewing on the network.” If the daytime programming block doesn’t necessarily put up massive audience numbers (the Nielsen deliveries can be measured in terms of hundreds of thousands of viewers, rather than millions), that’s sort of beside the point.
“It’s the studio shows that allow us to stay in the conversation around sports,” Mulvihill says. “There’s just a never-ending dialogue around sports, and those shows are what keeps us prominent in that ongoing discussion.”
In light of the accelerated erosion of the traditional cable bundle, Mulvihill has taken to examining TV ratings in the light of what he calls “spikiness.”
“The value of a network can be derived by looking at how often it proves itself to be essential,” Mulvihill says. “In other words, how often does the channel air something that can be characterized as ‘must-see’ programming to at least some percentage of the audience?”
By Mulvihill’s lights, an average delivery of 2 million viewers gets you over the spikiness threshold. Across the cable dial, the networks that hit that mark with the greatest frequency are devoted to news and sports; per Nielsen, Fox News Channel in 2022 shredded the field with no fewer than 1,833 telecasts that averaged at least 2 million viewers. ESPN finished a distant second with 169 telecasts, while FS1 took ninth place with 25. But for the fifth-ranked Hallmark Channel (38), the remainder of last year’s 10 spikiest cable nets were all buoyed by news and sports programming.
The studio shows, then, represent the between-spikes normal, the steady drumbeat of impressions that help pay the bills when FS1 isn’t airing postseason MLB games or college football or NASCAR Cup races. And the money follows the conversation. Per iSpot.tv estimates, The Herd has generated $7.9 million in ad revenue since the year began, while serving up some 2.57 billion ad impressions. Undisputed, which is in the midst of a summer hiatus, has generated $5.5 million in ad revenue, while notching 1.46 million impressions.
ESPN still scarfs up the lion’s share of the daytime dollars, as First Take has raked in $21.7 million in revenue year-to-date against 5.25 billion ad impressions, while iSpot eyes Get Up’s haul at $17.3 million and 4.83 million impressions. FS1 will get Undisputed back on track starting Monday, Aug. 28, when the rebooted show returns with Bayless in the captain’s chair opposite a rotating cast of foils that is said to include the garrulous former Legion of Boom standout Richard Sherman and ex-ESPN analyst Rachel Nichols. (Trap Jesus/autotune enthusiast Lil Wayne is also expected to be in the mix, which explains the accompanying photograph.)
That the morning shows are highly relevant isn’t just for Nielsen to decide. Beyond the millions of bonus impressions that get clocked on platforms such as YouTube and Twitter—just as no New Yorker calls One World Trade Center the “Freedom Tower,” we’re not latching on to the social media site’s algebraic rebrand—there’s also a harder-to-quantify sense that the various sports fora are in and of themselves part of the national discourse on sports. Have a gander at Netflix’s Quarterback series, and the cuts and subsequent callbacks to clips of a.m. pontificators like Stephen A. and Skip and the Good Morning Football gang are hard to miss. Whenever the filmmakers feel the need to reach for a splash of the zeitgeist, viewers are given a few belts from the cable shows.
But perhaps the most convincing show of relevance has to do with how these shows are performing in the teeth of a crumbling linear-TV model. In the past year, the cable bundle has lost 11% of its national customer base, and overall TV usage has withered along with the subscriber numbers. And yet, the audience for these shows keeps growing; in July, First Take notched its 12th consecutive month of ratings gains, and Wright’s First Things First is on pace to have its best year ever, with viewership currently up 76% versus the year-ago period.
The rising ratings in the face of the ongoing churn away from the bundle speaks to an inherent truth about the viewers who are keeping the old pay-TV model alive. “I recognize that we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of viewers rather than millions, but there’s something going on there that’s counter to the greater distribution trend,” Mulvihill says. “This implies that cord-cutting is happening all around sports fans, but sports fans and the heaviest consumers of sports are staying in the bundle.”
You hear that, cable Chicken Littles? Before you scrap your still extraordinarily lucrative linear-TV model, you may want to consider how these bundled diehards are lining up for all that sports/news programming. There may never prove to be a viable explanation for Cap’n Crunch’s factory-mishap packaging, but there’s no mystery as to why Skip Bayless—and Lil Wayne—walk among us.
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