Here’s why the NFL should skip Sunday night playoff games – Yahoo Sports

The NFL ratings were predictably massive, particularly the 48.5 million who tuned into Sunday’s Green Bay-Dallas game.

By way of comparison, that’s eight million more than the historic and thrilling Chicago Cubs-Cleveland Indians World Series Game 7 and 18 million more than the historic and equally thrilling Cleveland-Golden State NBA Finals Game 7.

The Packers and Cowboys game was not a Super Bowl. It was the second round. The Super Bowl will do 110-120 million viewers. The National Football League is a television dynamo unto itself.

Which is why the ratings for the other playoff game are concerning, and not in the usual way, but in a potentially related way.

An audience of 37.1 million watched the Pittsburgh-Kansas City divisional round game Sunday night (just below Cubs-Indians, higher than Cavs-Warriors).

NBC spun it as the most ever for a prime-time divisional round game. That’s in part because it was a good, competitive game. That’s in part because Green Bay-Dallas delivered an immense “lead-in” – different network, but nearly 50 million football fans just a channel change away.

And, most likely, because this was the first Sunday night prime-time game – all previous ones have been on Saturday.

The Steelers-Chiefs was originally scheduled for a 1 p.m. ET kick. The game was moved to 8:20 p.m. ET because of an ice storm that hit Kansas City. The NFL was concerned about fans getting to the stadium and didn’t want to further tax already stressed emergency personnel. It was the right call.

Sunday night delivers ratings, even on a holiday weekend. NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” slate of games is annually the No. 1 television show in the country. Prime time works, which is one reason why ESPN is reporting the NFL is already considering putting more playoff games on Sunday night. The league is known to chase the easy gold – and pile it up. So maybe this is the future.

Here’s some unsolicited and sure-to-be-ignored advice to the NFL: Don’t do it.

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,” Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur, NBA owner and “Shark Tank” reality-show star said in 2014 about the NFL. “Just watch – when you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule No. 1 of business.”

Cuban was mocked when he originally said this, hailed as an NBA guy jealous of NFL success. As football ratings began to slip this year, his words began looking clairvoyant.

And make no mistake: Playoff games on Sunday night are pig-fattening moments.

Yes, more people might watch, because more people watch TV at night than the day. That isn’t always true – Packers-Cowboys kicked off at 4:40 p.m. ET. However, you can’t always count on two major teams playing a back-and-forth thriller.

The question is not just how many people are watching at night, but what people are watching. Namely, could it create any future impact on the NFL’s ratings juggernaut? It’s not so much more or less of an audience as it is a different audience, the diversity of the audience creating fans who will come together for the biggest of games.

One of the strengths of football is that so many of its most important games are played during weekend afternoons/early evenings. That’s when families can gather, and when those that are older or have to work early don’t have to stay up way past their bedtime to watch the end of the game. You have multigenerational viewers, including, most importantly, kids.

The more games are played during the day, the more young people can watch the entire game and become enthralled in the sport. Seeing Aaron Rodgers complete a pass on third-and-20 with three seconds remaining can stick with you for a lifetime. How many of those same young people were sent to bed long before the Steelers-Chiefs played to the final minute?