Bills 30, Buccaneers 27

There are many ways to lose games in the NFL and the Bills were busy stockpiling them yesterday afternoon in Orchard Park against the Tampa Bay Bucs before finally finding a way to pull out a win. After the Bucs took a 27-20 lead with a little more than three minutes remaining, things didn't look good for Bills fans. Whether it was the inexcusable clock mismanagement at the end of the first half, the missed field goal by the usually very reliable Steven Hauschka or the untimely late game fumble by LeSean McCoy, the Monday morning quarterbacks would have plenty of reasons to choose from to explain rookie head coach Sean McDermott's first home loss.

But the Bills offence came roaring back on the next series with a deep pass to Deonte Thompson who the Bills plucked from the scrapheap after being cut by the Bears last week. Aided by a personal foul on the tackle, the Bills found themselves deep in Tampa territory and they scored the tying touchdown shortly afterward. What they needed then was to play some defence to get the game to overtime. But a Tampa fumble which reciprocated the McCoy fumble earlier in the quarter set them up for the winning field goal which Hauschka actually almost missed. The game ended with a prolonged Harlem Globetrotters style Bucs exercise in laterals which sent them closer and closer to their own endzone before it finally ended. NBC showed the play in fast motion with a ragtime soundtrack on their highlight reel. The disaster of the "home run throwback" play in Nashville in January, 2000 (which became better known as the Music City Miracle) isn't far from the surface of my consciousness and, honestly, I was worried about another calamity of that kind until the game-ending tackle was finally made.

Seven weeks into the NFL season, the owners are increasingly concerned about steadily declining viewership numbers. The average television audience for an NFL game has dropped about 7% from a year ago - from 16.3 million to 15.2 million. In 2015, the average game drew 18.5 million. Declining viewership will not impact the league's bottom line in the short term as network television contracts are fixed but when television rights are up for sale next time, they definitely will. The networks who broadcast NFL games now find themselves having to prepare to offer "make good" spots to advertisers whose audience numbers have fallen short of projections upon which advertising rates are based. Make good spots count among television networks least favourite obligations for obvious reasons. Credit Suisse has actually downgraded its target share prices for the parent companies of NFL broadcasters like CBS and FOX on account of their having to offer them. Now that's some serious stuff which can't be explained away by election or hurricane coverage.

A recent Gallup poll found that 57% of Americans consider themselves to be "pro football fans". That result is down an amazing 10 full points from a year ago. A CNN poll, which asked respondents about their support for the ongoing NFL player protests, found that only 43% supported the practice of players kneeling during the national anthem or skipping it altogether while 49% were opposed. Roger Goodell convened a meeting of team owners last week to discuss the protest issue and, to their credit, they did not mandate that players stand for the anthem as was widely expected. They realize, I presume, that the issue is extremely sensitive, especially when combined with Trump's flame-fanning tweets and they decided instead to propose a series of race relations and equality initiatives to placate the protesting players. What they really hope is that the issue just slowly fades away. If not for the President's involvement, it probably would have already.

So, what, if anything, will stem the NFL's decline in popularity? After decades of domination of North American sports culture which has seen the league's fortunes improve despite teams extorting stadium funding from cities under the real threat of moving (ask San Diego, St, Louis, Oakland), adding a full season of Thursday prime time games and a steady stream of criminal charges and domestic battery issues among it players, is the jig finally up for the NFL? I predict that the decline will continue for some time to come - perhaps another two or three seasons or more - before settling at a level maybe 20% below its peak of a few years ago in terms of television viewership. And maybe that will end up being a good thing for a league which has suffered no real adversity or threat to its bottom line until very recently. Mark Cuban, the outspoken NBA owner, said this a few years ago about the NFL moving to a full slate of Thursday games: "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered."