Who’s on TV? An analysis of which NFL teams are loved, and which are shunned, by the broadcast networks Scott Follow Apr 9, 2017 · 7 min read

NATIONAL BROADCASTS are precious commodities in the NFL. For teams and players, national television broadcasts bring prestige and visibility to their brands. For fans living outside of their team’s market, national broadcasts are one of the few ways they can see their team play at a low cost.

Most analyses of NFL scheduling use the prime-time game as their unit of measure. We think this is a flawed metric in this era of cord-cutting and the poorly-regarded Thursday Night Football. In this article, we’ll instead look at the number of national broadcast appearances each team has made between the 2012 and 2016 seasons. We’ll compare this to how well the teams perform on the field (using regular season records) to get a measure of how much exposure each team gets relative to the quality of its play.

Methodology

“National broadcasts” include the following:

Sunday Night Football on NBC

This one is easy. All SNF games on NBC are national broadcasts.

National Sunday afternoon games

Each week (except for week 17), either FOX or CBS has a double-header. One of the second games in the double-header is designated as the “national” game and shown to a wide audience. We’re counting those games as a national broadcast. They can be identified as the bold games in the 506Sports listings, which serve as our source. Note that we aren’t including early-morning London games.

In week 17, both FOX and CBS have double-headers, but (usually) there isn’t a single designated national broadcast game. Therefore, we aren’t counting any week 17 Sunday afternoon games in this article.

Thursday and Saturday games that are broadcast

This includes some, but not all, Thursday and Saturday night games. This also includes NFL Thursday Kickoff and the Thanksgiving games. Remember that only broadcast games qualify, so the annual TNF Titans-Jags classic on NFL Network doesn’t count.

Monday Night Football games are cable-exclusive, so they aren’t counted.

The Data