49ers' President: Ratings May Be Down, but Football Demand Is High
Fans are consuming pro football games at “record levels,” according to the president of the San Francisco 49ers.
But with ratings for NFL games sliding amid the changing media landscape, Al Guido says the league needs to better job of reaching viewers.
“If you look at the deal we did with Amazon, if you look at the Verizon-Oath deal, the Thursday night deal -- for us, we gotta get to a point where we have content in every single fan’s hand,” he told Cheddar in an interview. “And we’ve removed some of the exclusivities, which I think will lead to better ratings moving forward.”
Guido was referencing the deal struck between the league and Fox this week to carry Thursday Night Football games for the next five seasons.
The $3 billion price tag raised some eyebrows in light of ratings numbers -- research firm MoffettNathanson found viewership was down 13 percent during the regular season this year, and as much as 20 percent for the playoffs. Whether those declines continue into this weekend’s Super Bowl remains to be seen.
The New England Patriots will face off against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, February 4th.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/how-the-san-francisco-49ers-are-taking-advantage-of-silicon-valley).
The National Women's Soccer League is partnering with Voyager Digital as its first-ever cryptocurrency brokerage in a multi-year deal. Marla Messing, interim CEO of the NWSL, and Steve Ehrlich, CEO of Voyager Digital, joined Cheddar to discuss benefitting the league and educating players and fans as a way of democratizing cryptocurrency. Messing explained that the players themselves will own half the assets as part of how the deal is structured. "My hope is, just in terms of the expectations of crypto over the long term, that I hope a lot of them are able to just let it sit there," she said. "And that one day this will be a nice retirement account for them."
Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini joined Cheddar's Kristen Scholer to discuss plans for the future even as COVID-19 upended Barstool's sponsorship of the Arizona Bowl featuring the Boise State Broncos and the Central Michigan Chippewas due to the spreading omicron variant. "In our case as a company, coronavirus has been a big boom for us," she noted. "We've been able to create a lot of new programming, launch a lot of different personalities, and frankly take share from traditional media, and that's what we've done the entire pandemic." While she admitted to taking a hit on the canceled Bowl game, live events aren't completely off the table for Barstool in 2022. Nardini also talked about potential sports betting expansion following its partnership with Penn National Gaming.
Five women have been named to the U.S. short-track speedskating team for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Among those five, there was only one returning Olympian of the group, Maame Biney, who competed in the 2018 Olympics as the first African-American woman to ever qualify for the U.S. short-track speedskating team. JD sat down with Biney to discuss how she's preparing for the games.
Eric Mitchell, Sports Analyst and President & CEO of LifeFlip Media, breaks down the updated rules around testing in the NFL and outlines how vaccinated players are impacted by new return-to-play guidelines.
Carlo and Baker kick off the weirdest week of the year with all the news you missed over the holiday weekend, including calls for the CDC to shorten its isolation window as Omicron sweeps through the country.
The 2022 Winter Olympics will be without some of hockey's biggest players. The NHL and the NHL Player's Association have agreed to not participate in the men's hockey tournament at the Games in Beijing next year. The league has been forced to postpone some games because of a rise in COVID-19 cases among players. Washington Post sports reporter Samantha Pell joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss what this could mean for the Winter Olympics and the sport of hockey.
