With NFL ratings on the rise, Donald Trump is denied a favorite punching bag
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It’s been nearly a month since Donald Trump last tweeted about the NFL, and while he generally doesn’t allow facts to get in the way of his many personal and political beefs, the league’s ratings bounce has made it all but impervious to the president’s signature 280-character harangues.
Through the first four weeks of the 2018-19 season, the NFL is punting serious rump, putting together a string of Trump-silencing TV deliveries. In addition to sending the mercurial, ratings-obsessed POTUS into a sort of extended Twitter timeoutthe last time Trump took a digital swipe at the league was on Sept. 9, when he blamed NBC’s NFL Kickoff Game declines on the usual “anthem protest” canardthe league’s ratings have calmed the nerves of advertisers who feared that football was losing its hold on the American imagination.
After two seasons of back-to-back declines, ratings for the 25 regional and national NFL TV windows on the books are up slightly compared to the year-ago period. According to Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, NFL broadcasts are averaging 15.8 million viewers, which marks a modest 1 percent improvement versus the analogous period in 2017, while household ratings are up 2 percent to a 9.2. (As a single rating point represents 1.2 million TV homes, that 9.2 figure translates to around 11 million households.)
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