It’s one of the rare weekends on the U.S. sports calendar when the NFL takes a back seat to other sports, but if the annual scouting combine doesn’t necessarily send the Nielsen dials spinning, the televised event is still integral to league’s bottom line.
Last year’s combine averaged a six-year high of 251,000 viewers across the NFL’s linear TV and digital platforms, a turnout that included 390,000 NFL Network viewers for Saturday afternoon’s skill-position showcase. While Saturday’s numbers marked a healthy 19% improvement from the year-ago draw of 329,000 viewers, the combine deliveries were eclipsed by what might be charitably characterized as niche offerings.
Among the telecasts that beat the QB/WR/RB segment of last year’s combine were Aston Villa’s 3-2 victory over a since-relegated Luton Town on USA Network (416,000), NBC’s coverage of the men’s slalom at the Stifel Palisades Tahoe Cup (403,000 viewers) and the third round of the Cognizant Classic on Golf Channel (411,000).
And those were just some of the sporting events that went head-to-head with the combine. In primetime, a LIGA MX match on Univision (Cruz Azul vs. Guadalajara) averaged 978,000 viewers, while ABC won the programming day outright with its NBA matchup (Nuggets-Lakers, 3.05 million).
This year’s combine audience numbers won’t be made available until late Tuesday.
If these are apples-to-pineapples comparisons—even Bill Belichick probably can’t sit through four hours of three-cone drills, 40-yard dashes and hand-size measurements—the combine’s relatively unspectacular ratings are an anomaly for a league that has made a mission of overshadowing everything else on the TV dial. For example, the first round of last year’s NFL draft averaged a three-year high of 12.1 million viewers, a figure that includes the 11.6 million fans who tuned in via ABC, ESPN and NFL Net. The TV deliveries were four-and-a-half times what TNT scared up for Game 3 of the Knicks-Sixers NBA playoff series (2.57 million), which aired opposite the draft.
For all that, the combine is increasingly important to the league’s cable flagship, especially now that NFL Network’s coverage of live games has been whittled down to just a handful of dates. Last season saw NFL Net televise four exclusive overseas games, each of which kicked off at the crack of dawn on the West Coast. The channel closed out its 2024 campaign on Dec. 28 with a Saturday tripleheader, topping out with just shy of 11 million viewers for its coverage of the Bengals’ 30-24 overtime win over the Broncos.
While NFL Net’s slate of exclusive games has held steady at seven per season, the league’s shift of its Thursday Night Football package to Amazon Prime eliminated 11 annual weeknight simulcasts. Despite sharing the road with Fox in later years, the TNF simulcasts werea crucial element in maintaining NFL Net’s sizable carriage fees, as the cabler’s live telecasts often averaged over 3 million viewers per week.
In the absence of all those hours of live football, the sheer tonnage of combine coverage has helped justify NFL Net’s relatively steep affiliate fees. With an average payment of approximately $2.28 per subscriber per month, the channel is on track to generate some $1.42 billion this year just for turning the lights on every morning. Exclusives are key to maintaining that passive cash flow.
For what it’s worth, the combine enjoyed a boost in recent years when big-reach broadcaster ABC got in on the action. In 2019, the first year the combine aired on network TV, ABC averaged 790,000 viewers for the QB and receiver drills. The Disney-owned over-the-air net drew 976,000 viewers with its combine coverage in 2020, which would prove to be its last; the following year’s event was canceled (COVID), and ABC hasn’t been in the mix since.
As talks about a potential sale of the NFL’s media assets begin to heat up again after a long period of inactivity—the league first began applying shoe leather to the whitewalls back in 2021, when it tapped Goldman Sachs to help find a potential buyer for the cable channel and its proprietary website—it’s likely that coverage of the combine as fans have come to know it over the past two decades is about to change significantly, especially if ESPN decides to break out the checkbook.
In the meantime, the combine will continue to serve the superfans, even if the stopwatch data isn’t much of an indication of a future pro’s potential. While Jerry Rice’s official time in the 40 remains shrouded in mystery, Bill Walsh later recalled that the league’s greatest wideout ran a glacial 4:59 in the 1985 combine. Straight-line acceleration isn’t necessarily a barometer of greatness; among the 10 fastest sprinters in the league’s record books are wide receiver John Ross III (4:22), journeyman receiver Rondel Menendez (4:24) and former Arena footballer Jerome Mathis (4:26).
