No Wonder There are Fewer TV Sports Viewers. Networks Have Driven Them Away

It's Saturday, a lazy one and too freaky hot during a typical Southern July to be outside doing much of anything.  

So what does one do? Watch sports on TV, of course.

Or do you?

I'm a cord-cutter. I don't have cable or satellite TV anymore and likely won't any time soon. Unfortunately, watching any sports requires you these days to at least have a service like Sling TV for a la carte network choosings, such as ESPN.  I've had that for a few years now.

But that's more effort than I'd like to make.  I like turning on the TV and there are sports.  Especially on a Saturday afternoon.  When I grew up, I could watch NASCAR, maybe an IndyCar race, a major league baseball game, or two, and other major sports pretty easily.  It's Saturday and that's what you'd do.

Today, that's not true.  I turned on the television today because for as long as I remember, Breakfast at Wimbledon, the championship matches for tennis biggest event, is on early in the morning on NBC.  Not now.

ESPN took over Breakfast at Wimbledon and they are forcing you to pay to watch it.  Or see it hours after you knew Venus Williams lost and how she lost, when they finally show it on ABC.

And major broadcasters and sports leagues are wondering why fewer people are watching sports on TV, especially the coveted younger viewer.  A magazine study found that the average TV sports viewer is getting older and older.  Baseball, which has done everything and nothing to make sure they've marginalized everyone but conservatives and/or white guy fans, has seen the average age of their TV watching fans go from 52 to 57 years old over the last decade or so.  The NFL - their average viewer is 50 (my age) and their number of viewers has dropped eight percent over the past year.

Pick a sport and the trend is the same.

Here is where I impart my wisdom.

I point to networks' insistence that you pay to watch sports on TV.  We ain't doing it.

People have tired of the high cost of cable and satellite TV and are turning away more and more.  But the networks are hell bent on making you watch sports on some niche network.  If you don't buy a ticket to attend, they think you are going to be a ticket to watch from your living room couch.  Well, we aren't doing it.

Still, on a Saturday afternoon when you used to be able to count on being able to watch some baseball or something, you get some B-level, X-game type sport on TV, if any sports at all.  There was NO baseball on network TV today.  Nada.  Nothing.  And won't be any on tomorrow.  Or the rest of the week.

So if fewer people are paying for cable or satellite, and millennials aren't sitting around dialing up Fox Sports South to watch a horrible Braves team, who is being cultivated as a fan?  Your audience will be the same conservative white guy types who are still thinking the good old days of the 1950s when lily white, not diverse and very closed to pretty much everybody else, is just around the corner. News to them: ain't gonna happen.  That's not America anymore and will never be.  We've evolved, thank goodness.

So your TV audience is not only getting smaller and older, and you're gaining no new audience members since you've pretty much locked out the people who would have grown up thinking about watching baseball that was easy to watch back in the 70s and 80s.  They have to pay for it.  Today's 24-year-old who didn't grow up with Monday Night Baseball at his fingertips for free, where he could have easily just said, "eh, I'll watch since its on," or could count on it being on, could care less if the Braves are on channel three-hundred-whatever.  

Networks stopped cultivating sports audiences and now they expect them to want to pay for a product that they haven't created a lifestyle for wanting to watch.   What idiot thinks that is going to change? It makes no sense.  Creating a bunch of millennial-focused shows where loud-mouths opine in some supposedly hip way about pretty much nothing newsworthy is not going to change that.  Believe me.

When the networks start programming sports on free TV REGULARLY, creating a lifestyle, a habit, for sports fans, more and more will watch again and the nearly 60 year old football fan will begin to start looking more like the athletes who are usually less than half that age.  There is a place for pay-TV sports.  BUT its not the be-all, end-all.  Today's sports fan is proving that.

Tonight, I was hoping for baseball on Fox.  Didn't happen.  But Premier Boxing was on, so I watched a couple of matches.  But by 10 p.m., the announcers said those lame matches were the undercard for whatever the main event was.  But the only way I could see it -- turn onto their affiliated cable channel Fox Sports 1, which, of course, I don't have.  End of my sports night, and all I got was a bad appetizer.

And they want me to watch sports on TV???