NFL viewership is down this season, and team owners are starting to get nervous.

In a USA TODAY Sports report, owners spoke out about the declining viewership, which is down 11% from last year at this time, with a litany of explanations. Some are plausible. It is an election year. The first Sunday and Monday night presidential debates have had huge viewership numbers, which bit into those two NFL nights.

Some of the theories are ridiculous, though, including the theory spouted by Colts owner Jim Irsay and Texans owner Robert McNair that viewership is down because a few NFL players are kneeling during the pre-game anthem to protest police violence against African Americans.

I promise you, viewership isn’t down 11 percent because some guys are kneeling in a protest few people actually see on TV. Viewership is down because consuming content is different in 2016. And it’s down because football has been pretty awful this year.

First, to discuss the anthem protests. I know team owners who have their feathers ruffled by these players kneeling like to blame viewership decline on this. It supports their argument that these protests are “bad for the game” or whatever, but give me a break. Will some people not watch the games because they don’t like seeing black guys protesting? Sure.

But 11 percent of overall viewership? Come on. No one is turning off a football game because of something that happened with three players before the kickoff. People aren’t even usually tuned in for anthems. And as we saw with people making similar arguments about player concussions, Americans are very adept at tuning out “the issues” when it comes to watching a sport they love.

The real issues here are twofold: One, there is a ton of other content for people to consume and different ways to consume it. And two, the football has been bad.

It has. The NFL’s rush to expand into every corner of our lives has made it overwhelming, and the quality is suffering. Thursday Night Football games are, and have been for several years now, uniformly terrible. The players are exhausted, the coaches unprepared. They’re routinely sloppy, boring messes of games that feel more like a chore to watch than enjoyment at this point. Teams are afforded so little roster flexibility, they can’t rotate in guys on short weeks, so injuries have gone up.

(That’s all not counting the officiating, which has become so complicated and varying, the rulebook so byzantine, that we spend half the game figuring out what penalties are being called and how it affects everything.)

The league’s greed in expanding across the pond has resulted in early morning NFL games played in London that are also awful, the players jet-lagged and grumpy playing in front of neutral fans on soccer fields with no grip. The NFL has taken our Thursday night, and now it wants our early Sunday mornings, all to watch bad football played by exhausted teams.

That’s not all, though. The greed of NFL owners affects the quality in more ways than that. The way salaries are structured and concerns about health has driven down the average age of NFL players. Rookies are prized due to their cheap deals, so players cycle in and out of the league faster. What that means is you have a ton of athletic, young players out on the field, many of whom have no idea what they’re doing, trying to learn on the fly. Silly penalties happen. Coverages break down. Routes are missed. (We’re flabbergasted every year by the excellence of aging receivers like Larry Fitzgerald and Steve Smith, but they’re some of the only receivers in the league who know how to block and run routes anymore.)

On top of that, we have no idea who we’re cheering for anymore. Running backs come and go, disposed like tissues after a few seasons. I was intrigued by the play of Dolphins running back Jay Ajayi this past weekend, but that didn’t change the fact that I had no idea who he was. This year especially, when there seem to be about six good teams and a whole lot of bleh, it’s becoming harder and harder to justify tuning in to all these games. The schedule is oversaturated, the play is sloppy, the officiating mind-numbing, the games too slow, and the players disposable. Why am I tuning in?

And that’s not even the biggest issue for the NFL. There are just too many content options now. Between mobile phones and streaming services, A) it’s hard to count audience and B) there’s just a lot more to watch. The NFL still has fans, of course — ticket sales to games are still brisk — but people follow in different ways. Some people will just follow along on Twitter. Others just check their fantasy score, or check in periodically on their phone with ESPN. It’s entirely possible the same amount of people are following the league, maybe more, just with fewer people actually sitting through the game.

There’s also just a lot out there. Netflix, On Demand, Snapchat even, there are just more options, more opportunities to find your niche. There are tons of sports channels, and weekends right now have playoff baseball, MLS, Bundesliga, La Liga, Premier League, NBA preseason, NHL preseason, fishing, F1, college football … the list goes on. Those are just sports available for live viewing on any weekend. Why are we surprised that the NFL’s slice of the pie is getting cut up?

In 2016, audiences are being cut up into smaller and smaller pieces. People consume content in more and more ways. To keep its prize as the top dog, the NFL needs to make sure its Sundays are an event that everyone feels the need to tune in to. It has to be a national coming together every week. By spreading out the content though, and depleting it through all of the reasons listed above, they’re hurting their ability to do that.

That’s why viewership is down. Not because Colin Kaepernick takes a knee.