The Super Bowl continues to generate massive TV numbers. However, this year’s ratings weren’t as massive as last year’s.
Via SportsBusiness Daily, Super Bowl LI racked up an overnight rating of 48.8. That’s down a hair from last year’s 49.0 rating generated by Super Bowl 50.
New England’s Super Bowl XLIX win over Seattle saw a 49.7 rating, with the incremental amount likely fueled by the intense early days of the #DeflateGate scandal.
A ratings point equals a percentage of all televisions in America; thus, 48.8 percent of all American TVs were tuned to Sunday’s game.
Which raises an obvious question: What the hell were the other 50.2 percent of all American TVs tuned to? While plenty of people don’t watch football specifically or sports generally, the Super Bowl draws in a broad swath of the population.
Even then, the NFL still has a long way to go to achieve full saturation of the American market.
