NFL News

[Futureshock]

[froot loops]

Last year he was better than Russ Wilson, Deshaun Watson and Kyler Murray. By 2027 the cap is going to be at $320 million. Quarterback salaries are going to skyrocket.

[froot loops]

Always remember, free agents get more than you think. They can do the Kirk Cousins franchise game to Jones, but where did that get Washington? They would have been much better off if they paid Cousins on a long term extension.

[Topweasel]

I’m not sure that’s true….Cousins has always been pretty underwhelming in so many ways

Cousins has always lacked the it factor, but his production and consistency has been really high going back to the Redskins. Daniel Jones doesn't have even that. He hasn't played much better than a good backup and his teams success had more to do with good Defense, a good running game, and good coaching. Even then he only has had a single marginally decent year. He isn't any better then Trubisky.

He isn't going the Cousins route. If the Giants don't see him as the long term starter, he will get a marginal short term deal with another team then when they give up, he will get a backup deal. His only chance for good money is to get Giants to sign him long term. That isn't going to happen if he wants the going rate for top QB money. His best chance is to take a short term Team friendly deal <30 million deal and try to improve his game.

[Tom]

I want Rodgers back in GB but if he went to the Jets, watching him deal with the NY media should be entertaining.

[The King]

CAR has the picks to make a mega offer after the CMC trade. Good players on defense and #1 WR in Moore. That would be a major move for a small market team. Keep an eye on them.

[froot loops]

Daniel Jones isn't going to have to sign a team friendly long term deal. He's a UFA, either he is getting the franchise tag, getting a big deal from the Giants or he is signing a big deal for some other team.

[chemiclord]

Cousins has always lacked the it factor, but his production and consistency has been really high going back to the Redskins. Daniel Jones doesn't have even that. He hasn't played much better than a good backup and his teams success had more to do with good Defense, a good running game, and good coaching. Even then he only has had a single marginally decent year. He isn't any better then Trubisky.

He isn't going the Cousins route. If the Giants don't see him as the long term starter, he will get a marginal short term deal with another team then when they give up, he will get a backup deal. His only chance for good money is to get Giants to sign him long term. That isn't going to happen if he wants the going rate for top QB money. His best chance is to take a short term Team friendly deal <30 million deal and try to improve his game.

Funny thing about the "it factor"; it seems to depend an awful lot on the players around you.

People said Stafford lacked the "it factor" his entire time in Detroit. One year with decent defensive talent and genuine wide receivers at every slot, and all of a sudden he had the "it factor" to lead one of the gutsiest Super Bowl winning drives in history.

Look at the Vikings "gut punch" losses during Cousins tenure. They were rarely because Cousins didn't get the job done. It was nigh always a shitty defense giving up back-breaking plays or last minute drives.

Meanwhile, Aaron Rodgers apparently has the "it factor" in spades. How many Lombardi trophies has that brought to Green Bay?

[Trickalicious]

He’s gonna be the next Cousins

SInce he's a second Cousins, franchise tagging him is legal in most states, though it's still a little gross.

[ghandi]

SInce he's a second Cousins, franchise tagging him is legal in most states, though it's still a little gross.

As long as they aren't kissing Cousins.......

[jaadam4]

SInce he's a second Cousins, franchise tagging him is legal in most states, though it's still a little gross.

That’s premium content right there. Well done sir

[whatever_gong82]

This is from last week, and I forgot to add it online:

New NFL study shows even larger Super Bowl audience, but does it really matter?

By Bill Shea
Mar 2, 2023


So how many people really watched the Super Bowl?

The National Football League would, again, like you to know it’s a lot more than initially reported.

The official audience number released by Nielsen two days after the game was 113 million viewers, which is the aggregate total for the TV broadcast on Fox, digital viewership and the 882,000 people that watched via Spanish-language Fox Deportes.




That was enough to make Super Bowl LVII the third-most watched U.S. program of all time after 2015’s Super Bowl XLIX (114.4 million viewers on NBC) and the 1969 moon landing (up to 150 million across several channels).

But for the second straight year, the NFL also commissioned a custom Nielsen survey to dig deeper into The Big Game’s audience, particularly people watching in group settings at home and at places like bars and restaurants (known in TV industry lingo as out of home, or OOH).

The results released by the NFL on Feb. 28 show that 136 million people watched the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on Feb. 12 on a field goal with eight seconds left — thrillers are far better for sustaining viewership than blowouts.

Additionally, the survey of nearly 5,200 U.S. households by NORC at the University of Chicago on behalf of Nielsen shows that about 200 million people watched at least a minute of the game — a metric known as “reach” that’s different than the “average minute audience” that’s used by Nielsen’s traditional metrics and produced the 113 million viewer figure.

So what’s the official Super Bowl LVII audience number?

The networks, media and league will go with the 113 million figure because that was measured using the Nielsen measurements that are standard across television. The custom survey is for one event, so there are no other similarly measured programs against which to compare it, and it’s not the sort of thing networks use to set advertising rates.

“Ratings have always mattered more for how they relate to other programming,” said Jon Lewis, who has number-crunched live sports TV viewership at Sports Media Watch since 2006. “Context is what determines how big of a number that is.”



There’s no relative context for other games or programs under these same survey conditions, meaning we don’t have comparable data.

continued..

[whatever_gong82]

“Absent any context, it’s somewhat meaningless other than to tell us what we already knew,” Lewis said. “This (survey) is not a common currency used by everybody.”

The TV networks don’t make Super Bowl audience guarantees to advertisers like they do most other programming. Everyone knows it’ll be enormous compared to the rest of TV, which is why the rates for 30 seconds of airtime during the game cost an average of $7 million this year and certainly will increase in 2024 when the game is on CBS.

So why spend an undisclosed sum on a survey that doesn’t boost revenue?

It appears to come down to a bit of chest-thumping by the most powerful U.S. television property to remind everyone that the Super Bowl is, by far, the most-watched American television event every year since 1983, but the league also is interested in better understanding how many people watch in group settings — something Nielsen says it has been working to improve.

“The Super Bowl is singular across the television and media landscape not only in its unparalleled viewership, but because it is largely watched in group settings,” Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer, said in a statement announcing the survey results. “With that in mind, additional measurement is needed in order to have a complete picture of the total viewership of this special event, and the results of this custom survey with Nielsen illustrate the true magnitude of the Super Bowl.”

Live sports tend to have more group-setting audiences than other programming, so it’s natural the NFL and other leagues are interested in knowing more about such viewership. And the league believes Nielsen’s normal measurement methods don’t tell the whole story about group viewing of its gem event.

Nielsen estimated that 13 percent of NFL regular-season games are watched out of home in places like bars and restaurants and viewing parties, a figure that’s remained flat over the past two seasons. The 2022 Super Bowl had a 22 percent OOH viewership, or 9 percentage points more than the regular season. That jumped to almost 24 percent this year, per Sports Media Watch.



In the 18-34 age demographic, Nielsen estimated that last year’s Super Bowl OOH viewership was 38 percent, a figure that was 13 percentage points higher than regular-season viewership for that age cohort especially valued by advertisers. An OOH demo breakdown isn’t yet available for the recent Super Bowl.

With the ongoing decline of U.S. cable/satellite households — now down to about 65 million from 100-plus million a few years ago, with an attendant revenue loss — and the proliferation of alternative viewing options, platforms and habits, entities such as the NFL are probing ways to understand just how big their audiences are and where they are as they try to better monetize how fans watch their products.

“(The survey) is more convergence that the Super Bowl has a massive reach,” said Dr. Derek Rucker, a Super Bowl advertising expert and marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It suggests views may occur on other channels, so maybe the number is higher. But that’s just eyeballs, which is only one important factor in all of it.”

So far, nothing has matched traditional linear TV media rights deals for live sports, and such viewership continues to prop up the television industry. Figuring out where people are watching TV, and how many are gathering to watch together, in theory could lead to new or increased revenue streams — something important to the NFL’s goal of becoming a $25 billion business by 2027.

Nielsen has done the deeper-dive survey for at least the past two Super Bowls, and last year’s survey showed a reach of 208 million viewers, or 8 million more than last month’s game.

“Nielsen has measured Super Bowl viewership for over 50 years, giving us a front-row seat to the vast changes in how and where fans watch The Big Game,” Jon Stainer, Nielsen global sports managing director, said in a statement. “We recognize the uniqueness of this media event around group viewing parties, and this additional custom survey helps supplement our audience measurement.”

There also are industry-wide concerns about undercounting audiences, something Nielsen says it has worked to improve (and is rolling out its Nielsen One holistic measurements this year). It began measuring OOH viewership — it’s via audio signals emitted by every broadcast, even at crowded sports bars, and picked up by Nielsen panelists wearing a special device — in 2016 but didn’t formally include them in audience measurements until September 2020.



What that also means is the viewership totals before 2020, particularly for live sports and major events where people watch in groups, are larger than the official numbers. Comparing pre-2020 broadcasts are a bit of apples to oranges in that sense.

With the scale of the Super Bowl audience — a single-network behemoth every year — it’s an enormous cash cow for all involved. Fox estimated before the game last month that it would collect about $600 million in advertising revenue from the broadcast.

Hence, Fox and other networks don’t need a custom survey to continue to cash in on the Super Bowl.

It’s also important to remember that these are scientific extrapolations based on Nielsen’s nationwide panels of 40,000-plus TV households that electronically report what they watch (and provide the age, gender, race, income and other demographic data that the networks and streaming tech giants cannot otherwise replicate).

And “scientific extrapolations” is really just a best guess. That’s been enough for decades in the TV industry, which ultimately uses the viewership data to compare shows and to figure out what to charge advertisers.

“I’d remind everyone that the actual number doesn’t really matter that much,” Lewis said. “The Super Bowl is so far ahead of everything that the exact number doesn’t matter all that much.”

He sees the survey mostly as public relations, even as it’s widely acknowledged within the television industry that the Super Bowl probably has a bigger audience than the official final numbers show.

“The only benefit is PR,” Lewis said. “I can’t envision any real way this number is going to matter. It doesn’t change the calculus. … We already know it’s undercounted.”

Most fans, other than perhaps for some water cooler conversation or trolling/bragging, don’t care much about sports TV ratings. But a sizeable number of them do, and the leagues, sports, networks, tech giants, advertisers and critics obviously take great interest.





“A lot of people care deeply about it,” Lewis said. “There’s whole business constructed on top of it.”




Bill Shea is an award-winning reporter and editor who worked for daily newspapers in Ohio and Michigan for nearly 25 years. Prior to joining The Athletic, he spent 13 years as a reporter with Crain's Detroit Business, creating the sports business beat to the point that Forbes named him a Twitter must-follow on the topic for four consecutive years. Shea spent 2006-07 moonlighting as the last-string quarterback on a minor-league football team, an experience that will feature prominently in his eventual debut novel. A Cleveland native and jaded devotee of its star-crossed sports teams, he lives today in suburban Detroit, just across 8 Mile, with his family and polydactyl cat, Marti. Follow Bill on Twitter @Bill_Shea19

[ghandi]

What they mean to say is 113 million people have the game on while they are glued to their phones doing something else......

[Tom]

https://sports.yahoo.com/report-robbie-gould-won-t-181954242.html

I hope the Lions give him a look.