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A Friendly Reminder That The NFL Still Rules You And The Ground You Walk On With An Iron Fist

You spent a lot of time this summer thinking about LeBron, and his potential place in history thanks to both his title and Olympics dominance. It was a summer of Phelps and Lochte and Federer and Murray and Felix Hernandez achieving perfection and (on a much darker note) Penn State sanctions. Summer might be a relative dead zone sports-wise, but you still had plenty of sporting matters on your mind.

Then, the NFL came back and THRASHED THEM ALL.

And doesn’t the league want you to know it. Lest you wonder even for one second if the NFL’s reign over the sports scene might be threatened, either by another sport or by concerns over the dangers of playing football in general, the league wasted no time touting its Week 1 ratings numbers, which were, as NFL ratings numbers usually are, dominant. Some highlights:

A total of 105.9 million fans tuned into Kickoff Weekend games (Sept. 5-10) on CBS, ESPN, FOX and NBC to mark the third consecutive Kickoff Weekend with a total reach exceeding 105 million viewers.

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NBC’s Sunday Night Football opener (Steelers-Broncos) posted the highest rating ever for a Sunday night game (16.5).

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NFL games ranked first in all 30 NFL markets for the fourth consecutive Kickoff Weekend. NFL games also topped the ratings in 55 of Nielsen’s 56 metered markets — up from 53 of 56 metered markets in 2011. In addition, the second-highest rated show in 29 of the 30 NFL markets was also NFL programming.

We’d just like to know which NFL market DARED to think anything but the NFL was suitable for being one of the two most-watched programs in the area. We expect each resident will get a stern lecture from Roger Goodell about protecting the shield. And don’t get us started on the market the NFL didn’t even win. The insolence! Mostly, though, we did as we were told by our NFL overlords. 100 million or so of us, anyway. That’s only about a third of the U.S. population. The NFL empire may grow yet. And if we know what’s good for us, we’ll LIKE IT.

[Fang's Bites]

Getty photo, by Doug Pensinger

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