Millions will tune in the Super Bowl on Sunday – but won’t be watching the game

I reminded Leslie that the Super Bowl was tomorrow. Her response was, “Justin Timberlake right?” She’s never been a football fan, thinking the game slow and stupid, but she does like the halftime show – and after the CRTC overruled the commercial embargo, the awesome commercials.

I used to be a football fan, but not being paid to be one any longer, combined with the concussion issues has cured me of that. Watching huge men maim one another lost its attraction, just like boxing did after what it did to Muhamad Ali.

We’re not alone.

According to the Globe and Mail, the NFL experienced a nearly 10-percent across-the-board dip this season, after an 8-percent drop the year before. It is still far and away the most watched brand on U.S. television, however.

The league and its proxies counter that these setbacks are down to cord-cutting and that people continue to find football on other formats. (No one NFL-adjacent ever bothers to get into how any of this jibes with a marked increase in the NBA’s television audience this season.)

Recent polling suggests the sky-is-falling crowd has it right – the problem is not people refusing to buy the NFL’s all-access package, but people in general. They don’t care as much anymore.

According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC survey released on Friday, Americans across all demographics are losing interest – men and women, Republicans and Democrats, coastal elites and the heartlanders who hate them. No one group is fading faster than men aged 18-49, however.

Four years ago, 75 percent of that cohort said they followed the NFL closely. The number is now at 51 percent.

“They are the very core of the football-viewing audience,” one of the pollsters said. “If they’re retreating, then who’s left?”

Who is left indeed? The game on Sunday will still be a  huge draw. Millions will tune in for everything that surrounds the game, but the game itself.

Eventually, it will fade away as all things that are fundamentally wrong do, but many of us are only tuning in for the spectacle and an excuse to overindulge, not the sport.