For a league in need of some good news, Thursday night's NFL season opener between the Atlanta Falcons and defending champion Philadelphia Eagles earned only a 13.4 overnight Nielsen rating on NBC, the network announced Friday.

That is the smallest audience for an NFL regular season opener in the last 10 years, according to Sports Media Watch.

Not only did Thursday mark the third consecutive ratings decline for the season's first game, but the 13.4 rating is down roughly 25 percent from 2015, when the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots delivered a 17.7 rating in the last NFL opener before players began kneeling in protest during the national anthem the following season.

Although Thursday's game was exciting, Eagles-Falcons produced only a 13.4 rating

NBC's broadcast of the NFL opener had to overcome a severe weather delay of about an hour

The NFL has struggled amidst those controversial protests, which began in 2016. The league's overall ratings have dropped roughly 17 percent over that time, and according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the number of fans who claim to follow the league closely has fallen by 6 percent since 2014.

Only 10 percent of republicans and just 38 percent of white respondents said they felt the protests are appropriate. (The poll did not ask directly why fans may be losing interest in the NFL)

The last NFL regular season opener to have a lower rating occurred in 2008, when the Washington Redskins-New York Giants game was bumped up to 7pm ET to accommodate John McCain's acceptance speech at the GOP convention, according to Sports Media Watch.

It's hard to say how much the ratings were affected by Thursday's severe weather delay

Furthermore, the Eagles' 18-12 win marked the fifth-lowest overnight rating since the NFL began opening the season on Thursday nights, according to Sports Media Watch. (The NFL has opened the season on Thursday 16 times, but there is no overnight data available for the 2002 game on ESPN, according to SMW)

Naturally, Philadelphia had the highest regional rating with a 32.9 for the market.

The news was not all bad for NBC.

According to a network spokesman, the 13.4 rating was still the best for any live sporting event since NBC's coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics - and that includes the NBA and Stanley Cup Finals.

In fact, the other three networks only managed a 6.7 rating, combined, on Thursday night.

The players on the Eagles and Falcons all abstained from protesting during Thursday's anthem, including Philadelphia's recently-acquired defensive end Michael Bennett, who protested frequently as a member of the Seattle Seahawks.

Although players did not protest inequality or racist police brutality by kneeling or raising a fist in Philadelphia on Thursday, there was a significant amount of controversy as NBC aired Nike's new 'Just Do It' advertisement featuring former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who initiated the protests during the 2016 NFL preseason.

Not only did Thursday mark the third consecutive ratings decline for the season's first game, but the 13.4 rating is down roughly 25 percent from 2015, when the Pittsburgh Steelers and New England Patriots delivered a 17.7 rating in the last NFL opener before players began kneeling in protest during the national anthem the following season

On Friday morning, NFL critic President Donald Trump tweeted, 'What was Nike thinking?'

In addition to a social media campaign to boycott Nike, many people have been seen on social media destroying their Nike apparel in one way or another.

Kaepernick has been signed to Nike since 2011, but had not appeared in many ads over the last few years. In March, Nike and the NFL signed an eight-year extension for the apparel giant to continue as the league's official provider.

Thursday's ratings do come with one caveat, as the game was delayed by severe weather in the Philadelphia area, which pushed the opening kickoff back to around 9pm.

While the national anthem controversy has dominated the headlines, there is no consensus that it is indeed the demonstrations that have diminished the NFL's audience because the league is currently facing many other issues as well.

Namely, young Americans are turning the channel, and participation in the game at the youth and high school levels is suddenly plummeting, which portends an uncertain future for the country's most popular professional sports league.

Al Michaels (left) and analyst Cris Collinsworth (right) called Thursday's Falcons-Eagles game in Philadelphia, which drew the lowest ratings for an NFL opener since 2008

'The NFL has been sliding in the younger demographics for a lot of years,' said Jon Lewis, who writes extensively about Nielsen ratings on Sports Media Watch. 'Even in years when the ratings were otherwise really good, the younger demos were down.

'At a certain point, that erosion gets to be something that effects the overall numbers,' he continued. 'Because once you have people aging out of the demo, and they're not being replaced, you're going to see your numbers decline. We've seen that in other sports too, like NASCAR. It's not anything where there's one reason the NFL ratings are going down.'

According to Lotame data released in February, fans between the ages of 18 and 24 had the lowest interest in the NFL – and as Lewis pointed out, the reasoning behind that trend isn't quite clear.

One cannot simply point to the protests as an explanation because, as the NBC/WSJ poll revealed, 56 percent of respondents in the 18-to-34 age bracket felt that the demonstrations are appropriate compared to just 41 percent who felt they are not.

What's more, the NFL is still battling a concussion crisis after settling a $1 billion lawsuit with thousands of former players, both living and deceased, who have struggled with the long-term effects of traumatic brain injuries (TBI).

With mounting evidence about the dangers of TBI, the sport's participation has plummeted 7 percent from its peak in 2009, according to data released today by the National Federation of State High School Associations.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL HAS AN ATTENDANCE PROBLEM The college football season got underway in Connecticut on Thursday as the Huskies fell to the visiting Central Florida Knights By Alex Raskin, Sports News Editor for DailyMail.com The diminishing interest in football might not only be an issue at the professional level. According to The Wall Street Journal, Division I college football has seen a 7.6 percent decline in attendance over the last four years, but things might actually be worse than that. Going by the number of scanned tickets at home games - and not just the number of tickets sold or given away - actual attendance numbers accounted for just 71 percent of the official announced attendance marks, meaning 29 percent of tickets 'sold' did not get used. And those figures are worse at the mid-major level. In the Mid-America Conference, for instance, scanned attendance accounted for just 45 percent of the announced attendance. Advertisement

The NFL Kickoff game's ratings have fluctuated over the last five years, but have dropped roughly 25 percent since 2015, when the Steelers and Patriots delivered an impressive 17.7

According to NBC News, at this rate, there will be fewer than 1 million high school football players in the United States by 2020.

What's more, Lewis actually believes the Nielsen aspect is being overemphasized.

Yes, NFL ratings decreased about nine percent and eight percent in 2017 and 2016, respectively. However compared to the rest of the television industry - which is battling popular streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime – the NFL's ratings have done relatively well.

The league's audience share increased in 2017, and according to Deadspin, that percentage was actually the highest it has ever been last season.

'I'm not necessarily sure why the NFL is so panicked from a ratings perspective,' said Lewis. 'You can talk about merchandising, etc., but from a ratings perspective, the only reason we have TV ratings is for advertisers. Advertisers are looking to find where to spend their money. If NFL ratings are down, but everything else is down by as much or even more, then there's no problem: The NFL is still the best place for advertisers to spend their money.'

And while the league saw a 12 percent dip in the 18-49 demographic in 2017, networks like NBC and CBS both fell 19 percent in that demo, according to Nielsen, and would have done far worse were it not for their NFL programming.

Furthermore, 37 of the top 50 network programs of 2017 were NFL games, and NBC's Sunday Night Football remained the season's ratings king for the seventh straight year, according to Nielsen. That beats the previous record set by Fox's 'American Idol' between 2005-06 and 2010-11.

The Sunday Night football games averaged 18.2 million TV viewers in 2017, a 29 percent margin over the runner-up: CBS's 'Thursday Night Football.'