In the post-script of Super Bowl LVIII, there will be considerable conversation about the Taylor Swift effect. Some of that will be conspiratorial, like whether the NFL and perhaps the US government secretly colluded to make sure the Chiefs both made and won the Super Bowl to maximize her impact on commerce and perhaps even change the fate of the upcoming election. But other parts will be far more grounded in reality, especially around the popularity of the sport and, in particular, the Super Bowl itself.
We won’t know if it was Swift that moved the needle, but we do know that a lot of people were paying attention. In fact, Sunday’s game was the most watched program in American television history, with over 123 million people on average tuning in to the game and over 202 million watching at some point. That’s a jump of 7 and 10% over last year, which was up from the year before. In fact, after a dip in viewership during the volatile beginning of the cord cutting era, Super Bowl viewership has hit new heights as consumers figure out their streaming strategies. Which also suggests that the reported death of both football and television are greatly exaggerated, even if the latter in particular has its share of illness. In fact, the day after the Super Bowl, CBS’s parent company Paramount announced 800 layoffs, about 3% of its workforce. So even though the Super Bowl was a bonanza, the rest of business is losing money.
That, of course, is the big story. Not that American media is going through a seismic shift, but rather that American football isn’t. Not that long ago, we all predicted the end of this barbaric pastime based on a confluence of health risks and changing American demographics and the end of broadcast television as we know it. Yet despite all those changes, football has not only survived, but emerged stronger than ever. And that’s not just in the pros. ESPN supposedly just signed a six-year deal with the College Football Playoffs worth $1.2 billion per year for the right to air the new 12 team playoff. That’s double what’s paid right now for the four-team playoff and a four major bowl games. Which also means that ESPN has largely bet its financial future on the gridiron, buying viewership rights to pro and college games like they were penny stocks and building the vast majority of their non-live programming around the sport. So even as the sky seems to be falling for some of our media empires, everyone from Amazon to Peacock is looking to football as something of a life raft, or at least a soft landing.
So what does that all mean, and what does it say about all of us – the idea that we seemed poised to purge ourselves of the demons of football and move to a more enlightened, global age, one where we consumed soccer on iPads and celebrated 0-0 ties with European clubs. Perhaps it’s a reminder of the unique nature of football as an interwoven part of American society. Not a pastime we enjoy watching, but rather an exercise that reminds us of who we are. Very little embodies the spirt and ethos of America more than American football. That can be good or bad depending on your perspective, I suppose, but I believe we may all have overestimated cultural shifts in our nation and how football may become part of that evolution. If anything, we’ve drifted far closer to a football country than from it.
But maybe more importantly, perhaps football’s resilience should be seen as a positive, a reminder of the importance of community and communication. There are very few places where we continue to converge as a country, and we rarely share the same set of facts and ideas. Football, and the NFL in particular, is a rare holdout of that fray. Injuries and issues aside, there is something remarkably comforting in knowing that despite our seemingly irreparable divide, we can all still coalesce around the NFL – and the Super Bowl in particular. That at least for one day a year, and often several weekends preceding, we do all currency in the same space, one where large people vie for real estate across a 100-yard grass field. There may not be much left to America, but we all still love football.
Especially when Taylor Swift is involved.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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