Field Gulls
Once a Primetime specialty, have the Seahawks are falling out of favor with the TV audience - and can it be reclaimed?
Since everybody’s talking about how no one watches the Pro Bowl anymore, guess what else “nobody” watches?
The NFC West.
According to the end-of-season data compiled by Sportico, the Seattle Seahawks pulled the 7th-smallest national TV audience in the NFL this year. Seattle played in four nationally televised games on the season. Just like the offensive line, 25 teams had more favorable results last season.
Seattle averaged 14.01 million viewers this season, behind the 5-12 pair of the New Orleans Saints and New York Jets, and the three-win Cleveland Browns.
The Seahawks can’t claim a top-10 market like Dallas or New York, but they are the 13th biggest. Incidentally, the Los Angeles Rams and Arizona Cardinals lurked around Seattle’s position for the 2024 season.
Cardinals are just sad, man.
Seattle’s 6-3 win over the Chicago Bears on Thursday Night Football was not exactly appointment viewing.
I’m going to go on a limb and say that in the wake of what once defined the Seahawks, held against what the defense has been the previous five years, a correlation exists.
In fact, I wrote this about the first game for the Seattle Dragons - held in Seattle in 2020 - and the fan reaction.
But perhaps the biggest takeaway I had was that this is (mostly) good football being played in the same stadium, CenturyLink, and the fans are absolutely here for it.
If you think about it, there are only eight XFL teams across the country, and the fact that they chose the Seattle market to begin says a lot about the sports culture of the Northwest.
Pete Tenney, Director of Content for the Dragons, told me that they opened up additional seating for this game based on the response in-stadium and on TV to the Dragons’ first game in D.C. In fact, Seattle absolutely shattered the attendance of the other inaugural XFL games thus far. 29,172 people showed up in Green, Navy, Orange, and retro-Seattle blue in honor of Steve Largent. Average attendance across the rest of the league has been 17.5k.
The crowd received 20,000 orange towels (which felt noticeably un-Seahawk-like) and were dialed in the entire game.
But this defense is good, and the fans know that even more. The 3rd down volume, the sack celebrations, getting up for a first-and-ten after a turnover, all of it spoke to a fanbase that is both knowledgeable and excited for this team. The energy throughout the game is absolutely enough to draw you in, even without the third deck of CenturyLink in use.
Even the emotional connection to the game for the past 10 years has been largely on defense. Outside of Russell Wilson, Tyler Lockett, Marshawn Lynch, and some Doug Baldwin/Jermaine Kearse moments, who anyone is talking about are the defensive stars. Still are.
The dismal ratings are...
