Sep 8, 2018 5 min read

The National Football League has many problems and they are great.

Owning an NFL team is still a good way to make a lot of money and it will be for a while, but there are signs that the party, if it isn’t over, may be showing signs of winding down.

The television ratings are still good compared to most of what’s on regular TV these days, but that’s an arrow that’s pointing in the wrong direction. For the fourth consecutive year, the ratings for the league opener went down. It was a 13 percent drop from last year. Keep in mind that the NFL decided to open the season in prime time on a Thursday night, in the defending Super Bowl champion’s city, to take advantage of the fans’ hunger for football after the seven month offseason.

It’s supposed to be a big deal.

The ratings show that the only place where it’s a big deal is in the city of the Super Bowl champion. The NFL will tell you that its games are still the most watched shows on television and that’s true, but the owners have to be worried about the trends.

The Eagles-Falcons game Thursday night was boring. It was almost unwatchable. It was filled with dinking, dunking and penalties. NBC play-by-play man Al Michaels, the consummate pro, seemed to be having trouble staying awake.

When there was a play that might qualify as exciting you looked for a flag. There were 26 of them, 15 for 135 yards by the Falcons and 11 for 101 yards by the Eagles. There are too many penalties in NFL games because there are too many rules and too many players who don’t know them.

The league has had a major public-relations problem since Colin Kaepernick took his first knee in 2016. There is reason to believe that the ratings have dropped because of the owners’ gutless response and Kaepernick’s Nike commercial debuting during the Thursday telecast didn’t help. A good number of fans have turned their backs on the NFL. The question is, have the boring games made it easier for fans to find a reason to turn their backs and less likely to watch again?

The answer is yes. That’s a much bigger problem. They have to fix the games and that may not be possible. You don’t get fans to stay up late on a Thursday night to watch touchbacks, penalty flags and commercials.

Great TV ratings for decades and a license to print money understandably lead to an arrogance that allowed the owners to believe that their customers would keep buying whatever product they decided to peddle.

Only the arrogance that comes with a monopoly would make a league think it’s OK to put exhibition games with a bunch of nobodies playing in half-filled stadiums on national TV and make season ticket holders pay for them.

Several years ago, when they thought the games were running too long, they didn’t reduce the number of commercials. They reduced the number of plays by running the clock more. There wasn’t a peep of outrage from the media, the ratings weren’t affected and stadiums stayed full.

Players, obviously enlarged beyond normal human measurements by performance enhancing drugs, started knocking each other out of games. Instead of getting serious about drug testing and reducing their size, that arrogance led them to believe that they could trade one of the most exciting moments in sports – the kickoff – for one of the most boring – the touchback – and fans wouldn’t notice the difference.

It took a couple of years before an owner or somebody at a network realized that having a touchdown followed by two and a half minutes of commercials followed by a touchback followed by two and a half more minutes of commercials was a bad idea.

Still, more often than not, it’s an-everybody-knows-he’s gonna make it field goal followed by a touchback. On rare occasions when the kick is returned past the 20 yard line, you’re surprised if there isn’t a penalty.

When real football players instead of soccer players were kickers, field goals were literally a 50-50 proposition and usually a last resort. Jan Stenerud was the first kicker to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He made 66.8 percent of his kicks. The Steelers just signed kicker Chris Boswell to a $20 million contract. He made 92 percent of his kicks. Robbie Gould of the San Francisco 49ers made 95 percent. There were 10 kickers with 20 or more field goal attempts who were above 90 percent.

Do you know anybody who thinks a 37-yard field goal is exciting? They’re almost automatic inside 50 yards and it causes coaches to play it safe inside the 30-yard line. A league that was paying attention would do something to make coaches more likely to go for a first down or a touchdown. But, remember, these are the people who still think they can sneak touchbacks by you.

But, you know what? They probably wouldn’t mind seeing more field goals because nobody can get hurt during a field-goal attempt.

The kneeling and the arrests have been a factor in the NFL’s shrinking TV audience and that has to change, but they’re not the biggest reasons. It’s the games. There are too many of them on television and too many of them stink.