Sports ratings are becoming increasingly complex and meaningless

Credit: Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

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Mark Twain popularized the phrase that there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. But now we may have to add a fourth category — sports ratings.

Ratings are an obsession of the sports media industry, as they very well should be. Viewership numbers can give us a hierarchy of the true popularity of sports. They can tell us which sports and events are growing and which are in decline. They can even tell us how well sports are connecting with certain ages and demographic groups and who is well-equipped to maintain or build an audience through unprecedented churn and competition.

But it is becoming increasingly frustrating to try to decipher fact from fiction when it comes to sports ratings numbers that are being produced.

Nowhere was that more evident than this past weekend’s NFL Draft.

ESPN and the NFL touted the third most-watched opening night of the NFL Draft with 13.2 million viewers. But that wasn’t just on the THREE linear presentations available across ESPN, ABC, and NFL Network. No, it also included ESPN Deportes, Hulu, Disney+, the ESPN App, NFL+, TikTok, YouTube, and X.

In case you’re not counting along at home, that’s ELEVEN total platforms that the companies are combining numbers from to make their viewership figures look more impressive. They also switched gears mid-stream in a press release to count the number of minutes and views that Pat McAfee’s draft coverage engineered on social platforms. What’s next? Will we start talking about the Stanley Cup Playoff’s performance while Mercury is in retrograde?

How is anyone supposed to make sense of this melting pot of data that combines linear, streaming, and digital and presents one convoluted stew of statistics?

Not to be outdone, the NBA has begun hyping total reach of 170 million individuals throughout the regular season, rather than publicizing average game viewership that could conceivably offer year-to-year comparisons. More NBA games are on network primetime television than ever before, so it makes sense that reach would expand drastically. But does it actually mean that more people are watching games and becoming fans? That’s a more difficult question to answer.

The truth is that we have more data at our disposal than ever before. And the advent of the streaming era means that media companies can sometimes sidestep presenting the most accurate and complete picture of their true audience trends to play a convenient game of “choose your narrative.” We live in a world now where Apple can claim to have a bigger Formula 1 audience than ESPN, but then provide no actual numbers to back it up.

Nowhere has that been seen quite like the recent debate between which of the NBA and MLB is the second most-popular professional sport in the country. Supporters on both sides have been twisting themselves in knots trying to find an argument that will suit their point. MLB fans can cling to World Series ratings and local viewership numbers. NBA fans can point to consistently larger national audiences in the playoffs and regular season. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Who knows.

But that’s not going to stop sports leagues and networks trying to win the ratings wars and, maybe more importantly, the stories that will come from them. And all of this is happening on top of Nielsen methodology changes that have helped to inflate sports viewing numbers thanks to out-of-home viewership expansion and Big Data measurements. Unless you’re a pro wrestling promotion, that is.

Any time a challenging conversation about these numbers comes up on social media, the question is always asked why we should care about sports ratings. It’s important because it proves to sports leagues, networks, and advertisers what is worth investing in. And now more so than ever before, television and the billion dollar rights deals that come with it are what drive the entire economy of the sports world. That’s why networks and leagues fight tooth and nail trying to craft the best looking stories for their properties. The ratings and viewership numbers justify the entire operation.

But if sports media is going to start mixing together social, digital, streaming, and linear then the numbers will become increasingly meaningless. We’re not going to be comparing apples to apples anymore, we’re going to be comparing apples to aardvarks.

The more sports leagues and numbers twist ratings data to suit their own causes, the less important the numbers will become to fans and to decision makers. A TikTok view is not equal to someone who sits down to engage with a sporting event through a more meaningful and purposeful platform. But if we are going to be asked to suspend our own disbelief in evaluating this data, then it defeats the whole purpose of the enterprise.

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