The mystery of the NFL's declining ratings

The NFL's TV ratings are tumbling. Will they recover?

The election could be the culprit.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Images courtesy iStock, Peter Aiken/Getty Images)

For decades, professional football has reigned supreme on TV, pulling in greater viewership numbers "through recession and political unrest and war and shifting viewing habits and anything and everything else the United States has experienced since the Colts beat the Giants in the 1958 NFL title game," as Mike Florio recently put it at NBC Sports. That has given the NFL an aura of invincibility in an age of technological and market upheaval in media.

Until now.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.