The Separate Realms: Sports & Specials

The thing about big event TV is that it gets people interested in TV ratings who don't typically pay that much attention. For awhile, that kind of irked me. People will lose their lunch about a sporting event dropping by 5% year-to-year, but if only they knew that the vast majority of regular series are down more than that every year!

In the end, though, it may be for the best. Sports and specials really are separate realms compared to series programming, realms that are often much more conducive to live viewing than a scripted series and thus should be judged differently.

Throw in every single sports telecast and every single special telecast and here's how they stack up compared to the original series "league average":

Year	Sports A18-49+	Specials A18-49+
2006-07	132	92
2007-08	149	84
2008-09	162	91
2009-10	200	107
2010-11	218	95
2011-12	222	101

Every single year of the last five, sports have gotten stronger relative to series (though just barely this year). But the specials are a little less conclusive.

Sports

The best things we can track here are the "regular" primetime sports; in other words, dilute the impact of a matchup by including a large combination of games. There are only two of those:

Year	Sunday Night Football	Saturday Night Football
2006-07	170	72
2007-08	184	70
2008-09	204	91
2009-10	271	77
2010-11	314	78
2011-12	335	88

A big part of why the sports A18-49+ is up so steeply for sports is because of NBC's Sunday Night Football, which has nearly doubled in strength relative to series over the last half decade. In its first year on NBC, it was a big hit along the lines of CSI (185) or Heroes (165) or Lost (162). Now, it's well beyond what I'd consider a megahit, about 50% ahead of American Idol and likely stronger in the relative landscape than Idol was even at its height.

I thought that using championship series might not be that helpful since they're so dependent on matchups and series length. But when I lined them up, the results here were pretty obvious too:

Year	Super Bowl	NBA Finals	World Series	BCS Championship	NCAA BB Championship
2006-07	941	100	128	283	192
2007-08	1142	186	171	250	222
2008-09	1230	196	158	318	211
2009-10	1382	262	205	376	294
2010-11	1573	282	158	398*	280
2011-12	1714	296**	204	368*	322

*- The BCS moved to cable starting in 2011

**- Just the Games 1-2 average

While the results are not totally predictable for every sport in every single year, the overall trajectory is pretty clear and consistent; they're all getting much stronger relative to entertainment series from a Live + SD standpoint. I'm writing this not to examine which individual sports are doing better than others (that's coming next week!), just to illustrate that sports are clearly operating on a completely different playing field. The 5-10% yearly declines for series are not at all indicative of any sports and shouldn't be the standard. And even if there were some sport declining by 5-10% every year (I'm sure there's one somewhere), that's more on that sport itself than on DVRs or second screens or any of that stuff. For the most part, sports are, at the very least, much less affected.

Specials

It struck me after doing my investigation here that perhaps I ought to start denoting two separate types of specials. There's one type that's more sports-esque and one type that's more series-esque or perhaps even more rerun-esque.

The Sports-esque Specials: Awards Shows

Though the awards shows are for the most part down in raw numbers across the last five years (with the Grammys a notable exception), they are all declining at a slower rate than series in general:

Year	Oscar	Grammys	CMA Awards	Golden Globes	People's Choice
2006-07	377	222	144	174	94
2007-08	326	198	164	n/a	n/a
2008-09	405	248	168	164	101
2009-10	476	355	190	197	122
2010-11	465	394	185	205	106
2011-12	495	597	203	212	106

The Series-esque Specials: Holiday Specials

Then there are those classic holiday specials that the networks keep trotting out each year. Many of them are still able to capture something of an event feel and certainly do better than virtually any repeats would, but... they're also (mostly) declining at about the rate of original series. Sometimes a little more (Peanuts specials), sometimes a little less (Rudolph).

Year	Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown	A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving	A Charlie Brown Christmas	Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer	Grinch
2006-07	n/a	83	128	120	104
2007-08	116	100	140	155	207*
2008-09	114	114	114	141	127
2009-10	91	72	132	136	100
2010-11	77	87	102	154	87
2011-12	97	76	119	169	106

*- Got a 6.8 demo thanks to a massive lead-in from original Shrek the Halls (7.1)

The Separate Standards

All of this basically means that it seems fine to judge sports and awards shows "normally" or close to it. In other words, if a sport/award show drops by a small amount, it really is because of a loss of interest and not because of some larger macro reason. A 5% drop in Live+SD ratings for a scripted series is usually a pretty good season. With a sport/awards show, a 5% drop is... at least for now, pretty much just a genuine 5% drop. Not too thrilling, but it's nice to know!