SBJ Football: Rising NFL audience continues in playoffs

The NFL this year had its best Wild Card weekend audience since 2016 -- even with one game moving to Peacock and another moving from Sunday to Monday.

The six games averaged 31.4 million viewers, up 9% from last year and the best since four games averaged 32.6 million in 2016. The addition of out-of-home and additional streaming sources helps this number (as it does for all sports properties), but it’s another viewership win for the NFL.

Here are some of the individual game highlights:

• Fox drew its best Wild Card game since 2015 with Packers-Cowboys at 4:30pm ET Sunday (40.2 million viewers). The Packers won 48-32, but perhaps there was a sense of schadenfreude in watching the Cowboys.

• NBC drew 36 million for the Lions’ 24-23 win over the Rams on Sunday night, marking the network’s third-best Wild Card game since 1988 (40 games over that stretch).

• Bills-Steelers, which shifted to a late Monday afternoon slot on CBS due to a snowstorm, drew 31.1 million. That’s actually up 1% from 30.9 million for Dolphins-Bills in the 1pm ET Sunday window on CBS last year (where Bills-Steelers was supposed to air).

• ABC/ESPN/ESPN2 drew 28.6 million for the Buccaneers’ blowout win over the Eagles on Monday night. That's down from 31.2 million for Cowboys-Bucs last postseason, but still Disney’s third-best NFL playoff game on record.

• Texans-Browns on Saturday afternoon drew 29 million on NBC, up from 27.5 million for Seahawks-49ers on Fox in the same window last year.

• The debut playoff game on Peacock, Chiefs-Dolphins on Saturday night, drew 23 million viewers. That’s the most-streamed live event yet in the U.S. and up from what NBC drew in the same window last year for Chargers-Jaguars. Clearly, the NFL traded some reach for a new platform test run, but the league is happy with this.

A day before the Cardinals moved the majority of their non-football operations out of their longtime practice facility and into a nearby workspace Wednesday, the team "fired three high-ranking employees at the vice president level or above," sources told ESPN .

In all, "there were under 10 departures throughout various departments on the business side," a team spokesperson told ESPN.

CFO Greg Lee, who had been in that position for almost 15 of his nearly 18 years with the team, "was the highest-ranking executive to be fired," sources told ESPN. Cards VP/Business Development Mike Iaquinta, who had been with the team for 15 years, and VP/Digital Content and Creative Tim Delaney, who was a 16-year veteran, "also are out," sources said. The team's SVP/Corporate Partnerships, Steve Ryan, "will leave on his own later this offseason after 20 years with the team," the team spokesperson told ESPN.

The exits "also included two members of the Cardinals' social media team," sources said.

The team "held a meeting with its business development, content and marketing departments in the auditorium of the practice facility Tuesday, when the employees who were moving to the new facility had already packed their desks," sources told ESPN. During the meeting, the message from new COO Jeremy Walls was that "the jobs of those employees in attendance were safe," sources said.

After a period of calm on the sensitive issue of NFL ownership succession, the subject is back in the news in a big way this month -- with some reminders about how suddenly this topic can flare up.

In Indianapolis, news emerged Wednesday that Colts owner Jim Irsay -- who is receiving treatment for a severe respiratory illness -- was found unresponsive in his home in December after what police think may have been a drug overdose.

Separately, Texans owner Janice McNair’s son Cary, who runs the McNairs' non-football businesses, went to court to get his 87-year-old mother declared “incapacitated.” It’s not clear exactly what that would mean for the Texans -- Cary’s brother Cal runs the team -- but it’s reasonable to suspect Cary wants to change the status quo. It’s precisely the sort of family fight that has led to big NFL problems before.

To be clear, these news stories do not necessarily mean there’s a succession problem. In Indy, Irsay’s daughters, especially Carlie Irsay-Gordon , have become well-known to the league and involved in the team business for some time.

In Houston, there’s been some speculation the family might sell eventually, but Cal McNair has been in place for more than five years.

But these recent developments came to light abruptly, and in ways that are hard to read from afar. It’s a reminder that NFL teams, despite looking more and more like major corporations, are still family businesses with opaque motivations and internal dynamics involved -- and, critically, an unusual amount of power vested in a single individual.

Wednesday afternoon gave us familiar scene: Someone on “The Pat McAfee Show” gave a blistering take down of a famous VIP. Was it McAfee himself slamming Norby Williamson? Aaron Rodgers and Dr. Anthony Fauci? No, this time it was J.J. Watt coming for Pro Football Focus, the analytics company owned by “Sunday Night Football” commentator Cris Collinsworth and Silver Lake.

“PFF Sucks, have a great day everybody,” Watt said before launching into a longer diatribe about how their player grades don’t match what he saw in his career. Like everything on McAfee, it triggered an intense back and forth on Twitter. It was just the most prominent PFF criticism in a week full of them, from Steelers partisans questioning PFF’s snub of Watt’s brother T.J.  to wondering how they rated seemingly similar games from Jordan Love and C.J. Stroud so differently .

This has happened before with NFL royalty, with Jason and Travis Kelce criticizing PFF on their podcast. 

PFF Lead NFL Analyst Sam Manson hit back on the elder Watt: “He's being a hypocrite. He's complaining PFF talks shit about players & PFF doesn't know what they're talking about. While he talks shit about PFF without knowing what he's talking about.”

PFF says their whole point is to go beyond stats and to be as impartial as possible given their wide client and user base, with an “open door policy” for Watt or anybody to see their methodology. Arguing over stats is fun, and nobody at PFF seems too concerned about this last dustup -- embrace debate, right? -- but at times it felt like maybe a bit more than the usual.

• One expert told me the gains in NFL attendance this season can be credited to teams’ relatively recent focus on single-game ticket sales, including using the May schedule release to drive interest during the offseason and using data more effectively to find likely one-off buyers.

• Should Monumental Sports take the Wizards and Capitals to Virginia, the D.C. city council’s existing interest in bringing the Commanders back to the district would grow significantly, a source inside City Hall told SBJ's Bret McCormick and Wes Sanderson.

• My colleague Chris Smith wrote about five documentaries you need to have on your radar this year, including “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” which comes to Apple TV+ on Feb. 16. The 10-part docuseries will cover the rise of the Patriots, as well as the team’s scandals and the personality clashes. The series also features interviews with Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, Robert Kraft, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, former Pats coach Bill Parcells and celebrity fans like Rupert Murdoch.

• SBJ polled a number of sports execs with the simple prompt: "If I were commissioner ..." Among those looking at change in the football space are Lions SVP and General Counsel Maggy Carlyle, who wants the NFL entering the business of college football. "There is no better time for the NFL to take an ownership stake in its primary development league."

• On this week's Sports Media Podcast, Andrew Marchand and guest host Michael Smith of Prime Video/NBC/Peacock talk about the NFL's advanced talks with Disney/ESPN surrounding an equity stake in the network in exchange for NFL Media. The two also go into the current state of affairs involving ESPN, Pat McAfee, Stephen A. Smith and Jason Whitlock.

• Giants RB Saquon Barkley talked to SBJ's Joe Lemire about his offseason training at Exos, how he evaluates brand deals and training data.