The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is usually a television blockbuster, scoring the kinds of ratings that are hard to find anywhere these days.

NBC, which is broadcasting the Rio Games in the United States, is trying to keep those numbers high for the Aug. 5 opening ceremony. Forty million Americans watched the 2012 opening ceremony, which was a considerable increase from the 2008 ceremony in Beijing.

NBC has had discussions with the International Olympic Committee hoping to alter the closely watched Parade of Nations so that United States athletes would appear late in the ceremony. According to the network’s proposal, if they were to enter later, viewers would remain tuned in for a program of several hours.

But the idea appears to have collided with tradition.

The rule is fairly simple: Each country marches in based on alphabetical order of the first letter of its name, using the language of the host country. In Brazil, the language is Portuguese, and the United States is Estados Unidos, meaning the country would make its appearance relatively early in the program.