Not the World Cup, not the Oscars, not the Winter Olympics, not even the President of the United States could compete with the NFL in 2022, as America's favorite sports league accounted for 82 of the country's 100 most-watched telecasts for the calendar year.
That's a modern record, according to Sportico's tabulation, and just the tip of the NFL's iceberg-sized media impact. The 'Shield' was responsible for nearly 10 percent of all live television viewing in 2022, and made an incredible 171.3 billion TV advertisement impressions.
That the league would exert such dominance over the American media landscape isn't a surprise. It was only a year earlier that the NFL set a then-record with 75 of the top-100 broadcasts, and that trend had been building for decades.
That the NFL is dwarfing the competition is more of a surprise.
Neither the NBA, NHL, nor Major League Baseball cracked the top 100 with a single event. The only other sports broadcasts on the list were the College Football Playoff, NCAA men's Final Four, the Kentucky Derby, and the World Cup, which came in at 38th (Argentina-France final) and 58.
Other contenders included Joe Biden's State of the Union Address on March 1, as war was unfolding in Ukraine, and the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Another unscripted live telecast, the Academy Awards, drew 16.62 million viewers for 77th on the list, improving on a historically bad showing in 2021. Of course, the 2022 show was buoyed by Will Smith slapping host Chris Rock in the middle of the telecast.
The Winter Olympics was conspicuously absent from the top-100 besides the No. 36 slot: A 10pm timeslot buoyed by its lead-in, the Super Bowl.
Source: Sportico
And speaking of the Super Bowl, the Bengals-Rams tilt from Los Angeles unsurprisingly finished first overall with 99.2 million viewers – up from 91 million in 2021.
Most strikingly, the NFL has thus far appeared immune to the cord cutting and other trends negatively impacting the industry. According to Sportico, pay TV bundles were down 10 percent and the top scripted television show, CBS' FBI, draws an average live audience of just 7.21 million.
For comparison, the NFL's national Sunday afternoon window shared by Fox and CBS averages 25.8 million live viewers. Meanwhile, NBC's Sunday Night Football checks in at 19 million live views per broadcast.
So while the overall pie of television viewers is shrinking, the NFL's portion continues to grow larger.
