Rodgers, Smodgers: Zach Wilson and the Jets Are NFL’s Top TV Draw
Aaron Rodgers was supposed to lead the New York Jets to the promised land, or at least their first Super Bowl in 54 years. Unfortunately, hope is the last refuge of suckers. Four snaps into his first game in New York, the QB succumbed to what amounts to a design flaw; between the extreme vulnerability of the Achilles tendon and the essential dodginess of how the knee is put together, someone should have issued a recall notice on humans a couple centuries ago. As it became apparent that Rodgers wasn’t going to play another down, 22.6 million TV viewers got a good, long look at a dream in its death throes.
With his bum left leg on the mend, Rogers is keeping himself busy by challenging Travis Kelce to debate the effectiveness of COVID vaccines. Back in the real world, the guy who was supposed to spend the season holding a clipboard is under center again, and while Zach Wilson hasn’t exactly revived any flights of fancy, something extraordinary is happening under his watch.
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As it turns out, the 2023-24 New York Jets are setting the NFL ratings logs on fire. Wilson may spend a good portion of his Sundays looking flustered and startled, like a duck who’s been awakened in the middle of a dream about wet bread, but he’s helped his team deliver more viewers than Rodgers has. In fact, Wilson’s tenure coincides with one of the most unanticipated hot streaks since Nielsen started measuring TV viewership more than 70 years ago. Are you sitting down?
The same Jets who didn’t appear in a single nationally televised game last season are now the biggest single draw in the National Football League. If fans’ hearts sank when Rodgers went down against the Bills on that opening Monday night, advertisers who’ve bought time in Jets broadcasts are all aflutter. The league and its media partners may be even giddier still.
Through the first five weeks of the season, during which the Jets have appeared in three national broadcast windows, Wilson & Co. are averaging 24.4 million linear-TV viewers per game. Among teams that have played in at least two coast-to-coast NFL windows, the next biggest draw is the Kansas City Chiefs, who trail the Jets by a margin of 150,000 viewers per game. Next in line are the Dallas Cowboys, who need to scare up around 1 million extra viewers per window if they’re to catch up with Gang Green.
Dallas Disclaimer: Jerry Jones’ charges would almost certainly be leaving the Jets and Chiefs in the dust right about now, if they’d agree to stop churning out so many one-sided results. In their four national appearances thus far, the Cowboys have been on one side or the other of a 31.8-point average margin of victory. The league average is currently 12.6 points per game. Nobody’s sticking around to watch the entirety of a bunch of games that are being decided by four-and-a-half touchdowns.
Speaking of blowouts, the TV turnout for the Cowboys’ most recent national appearance should finally put to rest the notion that that one nice lady who sings songs is having a measurable impact on the NFL’s ratings. The Niners’ 42-10 demolition of Dallas on last week’s installment of Sunday Night Football averaged 685,000 girls/women in the Swiftie-adjacent 18-24 demo, which marked a 19% increase compared to the much ballyhooed results for NBC’s Chiefs-Jets game the week before (576,000). Despite averaging a half-million fewer overall viewers than the previous game, the Cowboys-49ers broadcast somehow managed to deliver 109,000 more young females. Just as there’s no such thing as Santa Claus, and Bigfoot is just some weirdo in a gorilla suit, the Swift Lift is a product of the imagination, a fable told to unruly children.
Anyway.
It’s true that the Jets have benefited from the popularity of their competition, having generated such big post-Rodgers deliveries opposite the Cowboys and Chiefs, both of which boast a massive national following. Their big test comes this weekend, when they take on the far more parochial Philadelphia Eagles in Fox’s 4:20 p.m. ET window. (The NFL has hedged its bet a bit, flexing Detroit-Tampa in the late-afternoon spot, where it will air alongside Eagles-Jets in such football-crazed Midwest markets as Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland and Milwaukee.) After that comes an ABC-juiced Monday Night Football outing against the Chargers, another Sunday night showing in Vegas and a rematch with the Bills in CBS’ national window. Suddenly, Amazon’s not feeling so squirmy about that Dolphins-Jets Black Friday game.
If the league and the networks issued a collective gasp when Rodgers staggered from the field on Sept. 11, the results subsequent to his injury have helped restore their sense of preseason elation. New York’s local ratings are up 64%, and the Jets are the only team to have served up north of 1 million viewers in their hometown market. In fact, they’ve done it twice. Meanwhile, the Jets’ remaining national games are either completely sold out or are down to their last handful of spots, and as the overall ad picture has demonstrated, marketers can’t get enough of a good thing. (In this case, “good” = the Jets’ defense.)
Season-to-date, the NFL ad market looks quite a bit like last year’s, with the usual gang of insurance companies, automakers, fast-food joints and gambling operations having snapped up the biggest chunk of in-game inventory. Over the last five weeks, you’ve already been subjected to an eternity of commercials for Geico, Progressive and State Farm, and the familiar car brands—Ford, Hyundai, Chevrolet, Honda, Toyota—haven’t been idling while waiting out the category’s pre-holiday spending spree.
Gambling/casino spend is down around 15% compared to the year-ago period, which translates to a shortfall of around $9 million across the networks, a drop that can be chalked up to a less frenzied marketing approach on the part of FanDuel. The NFL’s top spender in the category has invested in around 120 fewer in-game ads than it did a year ago, although DraftKings and BetMGM have softened the blow somewhat by increasing their own buys. Meanwhile, the Hollywood strikes did little to dampen the movie biz’s enthusiasm for football, as streaming services have upped their spend by 64%, and theatrical films are up nearly 50%. The two categories have plunked down a combined $151.5 million on NFL ads.
Total TV ad spend across CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and ABC is now at $1.4 billion, or 5% above the year-ago haul. This figure does not account for revenue lost to makegoods/audience deficiency units. Including the four Thursday Night Football games that have streamed on Amazon Prime Video, overall NFL deliveries are up 7% compared to the first five weeks of the 2022-23 campaign, a boost that flies in the face of a concomitant 10% decline in U.S. TV use since Sept. 7.
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