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The National Football League, which grabbed $18 billion in new deals with ABC, CBS and ESPN prior to this season, isn’t scoring too many touchdowns with audiences thanks, in part, to an unusually exciting baseball season chock full of home-run derbies and big-city playoff games.
“This has been a tremendous year for baseball,” said Paul Bennett, a spokesman for ABC Sports.
And that, apparently, has meant bad news on the gridiron. For the first five weeks of the new season, ratings of pro football broadcasts are down. Fox is off 6 percent from last year; ABC’s Monday Night Football is down 9 percent; and ESPN dropped 18 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research Inc. CBS, which snared AFC conference games away from NBC, is down 1 percent compared with NBC’s numbers last year.
Why the slide?
“It’s not just football,” insisted Pam McNeely, vice president and group media director at Los Angeles-based ad agency Dailey & Associates. “Everybody’s ratings are down.”
But she said the resurgence of baseball this season has been a major factor in the unenthusiastic response to the early part of the football season. “Baseball has been given a lot of attention and there has been an allocation of baseball viewing over football at this point,” she said.
McNeely added that so far, the NFL season has had very few surprises. “Denver (Broncos are) undefeated,” she said. “What a shock.”
ESPN spokesman Dan Quinn also attributed the drop-off in interest to a general lack of drama on the playing field.
“We’ve had a lot of one-sided games, 20 to 0 at the half,” he said.
Movers & Shakers
More Football on TV? Don Ohlmeyer, president of West Coast operations for NBC, said that the Peacock and Turner Broadcasting will make a decision in November on whether or not to pursue their own made-for-television football league to compete with the NFL Roseanne’s new talk show won’t be challenging Jerry Springer or Oprah Winfrey any time soon. In her second week, Roseanne drew a 1.9 rating compared to Winfrey’s 6.0 and Springer’s 6.2. Roseanne’s ratings also were off 10 percent from the show’s debut week The top syndicated show is “Wheel of Fortune” with a 10.6 rating Novelist Jackie Collins’ summer tryout as the host of her own entertainment magazine show also was sluggish in the ratings on KCBS (Channel 2). But Collins said CBS still wants to develop a show around her. Right now, she said, it looks like a series of specials for CBS’s in-house production company, Eyemark Productions Despite a lack of ratings sizzle for the proposed TV series “Blade Squad” when it aired on Fox this summer as a movie of the week, Lilly Tartikoff said she is going ahead with plans to develop more shows that her late husband Brandon Tartikoff had been working on before his death last year.
Larry King, who recently helped toast Hugh Hefner when the Friar’s Club honored the Playboy magazine founder as the 1998 humanitarian of the year, couldn’t resist taking a poke at Vice President Al Gore, who has been accused of suffering from a terminal case of dullness. “How boring is he?” King asked the crowd of about 600 guests at the Century Plaza Hotel. “He took a few pictures here tonight, sold some insurance and left.”
