Well, That Didn’t Last Long…

Tom Brady’s retirement is over; he will be coming back to play NFL football again in 2022; the retirement lasted about six weeks.  I was trying to think of a sports event involving “life commitment” that lasted less than Brady’s retirement and the best I could come up with was the marriage of Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman which lasted – seemingly – about a day and a half.  A friend asked me how I thought Brady would do this year and my answer was simple:

• If the Bucs put an offensive line in front of him that can protect him and generate a halfway decent running game, Brady will do just fine.  If not, he will not do well at all.

Please note that my response assumes that Brady will be a Buccaneer in 2022; given the current environment where players force trades, perhaps that will not be the case…

The Steelers have addressed their QB situation by signing Mitchell Trubisky to a 2-year deal.  They made that move after it was announced that Deshaun Watson would not face any criminal charges coming out of the sexual assault allegations against him; a grand jury in Texas chose not to indict Watson.  Even with that knowledge, the Steelers chose to go with Trubisky which tells me that the Steelers recognize there will be some “blowback” when Watson is cleared to play in the NFL and the Steelers did not want any part of it.

Naturally, Watson was happy with the grand jury decision and told the press soon after learning of that decision that the cloud hanging over his career was gone and that any team interested in his services should get in touch with the Texans and his agent.  I guess I would feel the same way were I in his position – – but not being there, his optimism seems a tad premature.  Almost two dozen massage therapists still have civil complaints against him, and Commissioner Goodell has yet to weigh in on any sort of suspension that might arise from a violation of the NFL’s “Personal Conduct Policy”.  I doubt that the Deshaun Watson situation is completely in the rear-view mirror…

• [Aside:  Ben Roethlisberger got a 6-game suspension when a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her even though no charges were brought.  That precedent happened in 2010 predating events such as the #MeToo Movement.  Ezekiel Elliott also gat a 6-game suspension based on domestic violence allegations where no criminal charges were leveled.  There is precedent for NFL suspension absent the establishment of criminal guilt.]

It appears that the Washington Commanders and the Dallas Cowboys are on parallel tracks these days.  The Commanders had a scandal involving their cheerleaders causing a long-term exec in the Front Office to retire unexpectedly and then moved on to a situation where a woman claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the team owner.  In more recent times, it seems that the Cowboys have also had some “issues” with their cheerleaders involving the surprising retirement of a senior staff member.  And now, a woman claims that owner Jerry Jones is her biological father, and she is suing seeking to get that “fact” acknowledged.

The paternity aspect of that lawsuit is the sort of thing that Maury Povich handles on his TV show with a combination of objectivity, rapidity and even a soupçon of aplomb.  Somehow, I do not think any of those sorts of conditions will apply to this lawsuit.  In fact, I think the only interesting point about the lawsuit will be:

• What are the measures – and how might they be applied – to get the plaintiff here to “STFU”?

The TV ratings for the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing were “disappointing” at best and probably closer to “miserable” on the ratings spectrum.  Some of the spin masters coming to NBC’s defense pinned that “disappointment” on the fact that live events were happening 10 or 12 time zones removed from American viewers.  That is undeniably correct – but it is also a distraction and not an explanation.  The reason I say that is that the 2018 Winter Olympic Games were held in PyeongChang, South Korea; those games “suffered” the same time-zone burden.  So, compare the “TV numbers” between the PyeongChang games and the Beijing games:

• In 2018, an average of 19.8 million viewers per night tuned in to watch all or part of the televised events.
• In 2022, an average of 11.4 million viewers per night tuned in to watch all or part of the televised events.
• That is an audience reduction of just over 42% and the “time-zone burden” is virtually the same.

I will not pretend to have “the answer” to this significant reduction in viewing audience for the Winter Games.  I have seen others attribute it to the fact that the Summer Games had to be postponed from 2020 to 2021 creating what some have called “Olympic Fatigue”.  Personally, any “Olympic Fatigue” I may have suffered had nothing to do with the postponement of the Summer Games in Japan.  Other commentators point to “international tensions” as the cause of this audience decline. Once again, that may have affected the viewing choices of some folks, but it was absolutely not a consideration for me.

Someone at NBC needs to figure out the issues here because NBC is on the hook for about $8B to telecast the Olympics through 2032.  That is a lot of cheese to spend on a property where the audience trend is decidedly downward.

Let me put this in another perspective for you:

• The 2022 Winter Games were shown in the US in prime time when TV audiences traditionally are larger.  They also reached potential viewers on a variety of channels and streaming services.  The potential for “big audiences” were all present for those Winter Games.  The audience averaged 11.4 million viewers.
• The average NFL game is played on a Sunday afternoon not prime time.  The average NFL game includes all those clunker games – – such as Jags/Jets on the day after Christmas.  And with all that, the average NFL game draws an audience of 16 million viewers which is about 40% more eyeballs than watched the 2022 Winter Games.

Finally, Dwight Perry had this comment last weekend regarding another NFL quarterback and his offseason events:

“Packers QB Aaron Rodgers officiated at teammate David Bakhtiari’s wedding on March 5.

“No word on whether Bakhtiari got the Rodgers rate, but the QB did get the bridesmaids to jump offside with a hard count.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………