TROUBLE IN PARADISE

STANFORD, Calif. —  As the National Football League Prepares for What May Be the Biggest Super Bowl Ever, the League Is Also Facing Serious Problems--Foremost Among These Are Declining Television Ratings for Regular Season Games, and the Ever-Lengthening Time It Takes to Play Those Games. But the NFL Is Reluctant to Bite the Hand That Feeds It Still--the Networks

The low point may have come at 9:22 p.m. EDT on Oct. 8, 1984, when Dana McLemore returned a punt 79 yards, giving the San Francisco 49ers a 21-0 lead over the New York Giants. It came 7 minutes, 33 seconds into the game--7:33 too much for millions of Americans, who switched from ABC to NBC’s “The Burning Bed.” The result--besides a 31-10 blowout in a relatively unimportant game--was a 14.5 rating, lowest in the 15-year history of “Monday Night Football.” It was a symbolic night, highlighting the question asked by much of the nation for much of the season: What was wrong with the National Football League? Nothing, it seemed, that a night like Monday, Dec. 17, couldn’t cure. That was the evening the Dallas Cowboys played the Dolphins at Miami, losing a close, exciting and--most important--meaningful game, 28-21, to fall out of the playoffs for the first time in a decade. The game drew a 25.1 rating, fourth-highest in the history of “Monday Night Football.” Nor is there anything wrong with football when next Sunday’s Super Bowl presents what probably is its most attractive matchup in XIX years--the 15-1 San Francisco 49ers against the 14-2 Miami Dolphins, the two best teams, two best quarterbacks and perhaps two best coaches. In fact, the NFL has come back strong in the final third of the season. Interest has heightened and television ratings soared as divisional races were decided and the playoffs started. Real problems, though, remain, and the NFL still is looking for solutions--some as drastic as keeping the clock moving on incomplete passes and out-of-bounds plays, some as seemingly simple as getting the television networks to tighten up their commercial breaks. Commissioner Pete Rozelle and the league’s other officials and spokesmen blame apparent fan apathy on a variety of things, from the United States Football League to drugs. But they take pains to point out that life runs in cycles, that the NFL had risen to such heights that a drop was inevitable. “The NFL is in a cycle,” agrees Louis Guth, who specializes in sports for National Economic Research Associates. “These things go up and down and I’m not inclined to view it as a long-term trend. Just as baseball slumped in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, football is slumping now.” Or is it? In 1984, the NFL’s average attendance of 59,811 was second only to the 60,745 in the peak year of 1981 and was up from the 1983 average of 59,372. Most of that increase, however, came from three teams: the Raiders, catching on in hard-to-please Los Angeles after their Super Bowl victory a year ago and up 17,300; the New York Jets, whose move from Shea Stadium to Giants Stadium in New Jersey added 17,000 seats per game, and the Indianapolis Colts, who packed the 60,000-seat Hoosier Dome with 18,000 more fans per game than the team had drawn in Baltimore. Those gains were partially offset by steep declines in Buffalo (14,200 per game) and Cleveland (13,700), where large stadiums housed losing teams. Overall, 13 teams showed increases, including the Seattle Seahawks, who added 14 more seats in the sold-out Kingdome, and the New York Giants and Washington Redskins, who also added a few seats in sold-out stadiums. Four teams stayed the same--sold out--and 11 showed decreases. “Attendance is usually, until recent years, the barometer of success in sports,” Rozelle says. Until Recent Years. Whatever the reality, a league built on image is hurt when its image is tarnished. And the NFL’s has been, for a variety of reasons, including: --Parity, the state in which one team can beat any other team on any given Sunday. --The five-year, $2.1 billion contract the NFL signed in 1982 with the three major networks, which caused the networks to add commercials, which also led to long games, and which created Thursday night, Friday night and Sunday night versions of Monday Night Football as well as the USFL and springtime football. --ESPN, USA, MTV, HBO, Showtime, the Movie Channel, Bravo, Cinemax, the Weather Channel, the Health Channel and other manifestations of cable TV that have fragmented the television market and led to declining ratings in all areas of network programming. --Owners who make millions regardless of their teams’ records. --Players who make millions regardless of their teams’ records. --Good weather. --Bad weather. --The 1982 players strike. --Artificial turf and domed stadiums. --Drugs. --Injuries. --NFL rules on dress and decorum. --Showboating, end-zone demonstrations and sack dances. --NFL rules outlawing end-zone demonstrations and sack dances. --Physical fitness, with more people participating, fewer watching. --Wayward franchises. The Oakland-to-Los Angeles Raiders and Baltimore-to-Indianapolis Colts, and very nearly the Philadelphia-to-Phoenix Eagles. --The 1974 and 1978 rules changes to add more passing and scoring and encourage imaginative coaching . . . from which came too much passing, too much scoring, too many penalties and too many huddles by officials . . . all of which led to longer games. “From the time I was 13 years old, I followed a pattern. I came home from church on Sunday, sat down and watched football,” says Don Ohlmeyer, who directed NBC’s football operation during the boom years of the 1970s and before that produced ABC’s “Monday Night Football.” “These days, I don’t watch as much. If it’s a dull game on Monday night, I find myself at halftime turning to the news, then going to sleep. Even if it’s a good game, that’s what I do. I find it disturbing that my interest has waned like that.” Not only Ohlmeyer’s. Figures from Val Pinchbeck, the NFL’s director of broadcasting, show that ratings of 1984 NFL regular-season telecasts dropped on all three networks--down 4%, from 12.6 to 12.1 on NBC, down 6%, from 18.1 to 17.0 on ABC, and down 14% from 16.7 to 14.3 on CBS. Further, according to network statistics, the ratings of the combined network telecasts have gone from 17.7 in the peak year of 1981 to 14.0 in 1984, off 19%. “We’ve had other periods where our ratings weren’t particularly high during the term of the television contract, but then you improve them,” Rozelle says. “The big thing about televised sports--Frank Stanton, when he was at CBS, told me--it’s a combination of entertainment and news. There’s nothing else really you can compare it to. It’s entertainment but it’s news as it’s happening, not replayed, and that’s its value.” Television made the NFL, rescuing it from 40 years of half-filled stadiums in a dozen or so major cities and making it a coast-to-coast phenomenon, a welcome guest in virtually every American home. But it seems to be wearing out its welcome. The average game this season lasted 3 hours, 9 minutes. That’s 1 1/2 minutes longer than a year ago and a full 10 minutes longer than a decade ago. Most of those extra 10 are non-action--commercials, referee huddles, penalties being marked off, program promotions, slow-motion and multiple-angle replays and electronic chalkboards. Ten minutes doesn’t seem like much, but it is, particularly in dull games. The Washington-St. Louis game on the final Sunday of the regular season went 3 1/2 hours, but nobody who watched it thinks of it as long because it was important, knocking the Cardinals out of the playoffs and giving the Redskins the NFC East title. And it was exciting--29-27, with St. Louis trying a last-second field goal that could have won it. But the ratings show that people seem less inclined to watch early in the season, or watch meaningless games between .500 teams or less. Or watch one-sided games between good teams--the 49ers are in the Super Bowl and the Giants made the playoffs, and they still produced the lowest Monday Night rating ever. Good game or bad, the networks still have to pay for the games and they have to get the money back somehow. Hence the commercials, 22 per game, two more than in the previous contract. Perhaps the ultimate occurred during a Dallas-Washington playoff game in 1982. The sequence was: Touchdown. Commercial break. Kickoff and runback. Commercial break. Three plays and punt. Commercial break. One play. End of quarter. Commercial break. Five plays in 10 minutes. “It doesn’t happen very often,” Pinchbeck says. “It’s only once in a while when the network gets behind” in its commitment to commercial time. And the additional breaks mean commercials interrupt momentum more. When commercial time outs were first added two decades ago, the league and the networks specified that commercial breaks were not to come after fumbles or interceptions. Now they do. “The networks obviously have to get commercials in,” Rozelle says. “And the chalkboard is entertaining, in their judgment. It adds to the broadcast. Obviously they feel the replays do too, and frequently they’re of great interest if they’re controversial or a great play. “They could’ve run Doug Flutie’s, as an example--going into college football--a half-dozen times and you’d look at it every time and see something else happen. “Sure, you get disturbed at long periods, and we’re working with the networks on that to somehow spread them out more. And we monitor their promos. Val talks to them about that and we limit them. And they’re aware of the problem of the length of games and also the clutter. We’re talking with them but we don’t have anything finalized yet for next year.” The man working on solutions is Tex Schramm, president of the Dallas Cowboys and head of the NFL’s Competition Committee. “It’s going to take a lot of different things to get the games back down to three hours,” he says. “It’s clear that television itself is causing some of the lengthening of the game and it’s clear that some of our rules changes have caused it. “But it’s a tough call to be able to change things. You don’t want to take away from the things that make the interest in the telecasts high.” Example: In 1974, after a period of increasingly low-scoring games and excessive reliance on field goals, the league moved the goalposts from the goal line to the end line and, to encourage punt returns, allowed only two players on the kicking team downfield prior to the punt. Nobody complained about the goalposts. But the punt rule brought a wave of flags--and more were thrown after the 1978 rule, sparked by a desire to reduce injuries, limiting blocking to above the waist from the front on kicks. And it brought scenarios like this: The ball is kicked and run back. A flag is thrown. The official who threw it confers with the referee. The referee calls in another official, or two, or more. Then he announces: “Illegal block, number . . . “ and marks off the yardage. Then he signals time out for commercial. “It seems like there’s a penalty on every punt,” says Ohlmeyer, who now runs his own independent production company. “If the penalty is simple and it’s not going to cause the punt to be rekicked, then go to the commercial. When you come back, you say, ‘Yes, there was another of the 4,000 illegal blocks thrown and the ball now starts here.’ You’d probably take five minutes out of each game that way.” The rules also have lengthened games by encouraging passing. And just about everybody passes. In 1976, only two of the 28 teams threw more often than they ran. And those two were both losers--the 5-9 Houston Oilers and the 2-12 Seattle Seahawks, an expansion team in its first year. This season, 16 of the 28 NFL teams passed more than they ran, although success still seems to come to those who run. Of the 10 playoff teams, only Miami, Seattle and the Giants, all of whom had injured or inadequate running backs, passed more than they ran. More passes, of course, mean more incomplete passes, more dead time. Of the 60 minutes on the clock in a typical football game, there is only five to six minutes of action. How long can that action be spread out without losing interest? “Of course the games are too long,” says one league official who asked not to be identified. “They’re at least 10 minutes too long. That’s the main problem. Solve that and the others will go away.” What are the solutions? Schramm’s Competition Committee is studying a number of alternatives, among them reducing the 30-second clock to 25 seconds and restarting the clock on incomplete passes, out-of-bounds plays and declined penalties when the referee signals the ball ready for play. In the last two minutes of each half, it would revert to the current rule. But there are drawbacks. “Two negatives of trying to shorten the game,” Schramm says. “would be the possibility of fewer plays (perhaps as many as 10 per game without a reduction in commercials) and the possibility--theoretically--of not giving a team coming from behind as much opportunity in the fourth quarter to catch up. “But everybody usually adapts to that type of thing.” Another possible solution is pressure on the networks to tighten up the commercial breaks. It’s a sensitive issue--the NFL doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds it--but league and team officials are very aware of the expanding breaks for commercials and promos. Rozelle says he believes one reason for the amount of attention being paid to the NFL’s problems is that people naturally tend to scrutinize the most visible operations. “If we’re down in attendance or down in television, some people say or write, ‘Uh-oh, looks like there’s a decline in the NFL,’ ” Rozelle says. “But you look at our league as against any other--the colleges or any other pro league--and it’s clearly the most stable.”