Do national TV games deliver? What 1,600 games say
Networks pick their national games weeks or months ahead. They pick on brand names, records from last season and big markets. Then the game gets played, and sometimes the best thing on all night is a regional broadcast nobody outside two cities could see.
I wanted to know how often that happens. So I took every finished game The Lineup Is tracked since September 1 in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and college football, about 1,600 games, and asked two questions. Did national TV games clear our "worth watching" bar more often than the rest? And on a given night, was the single most watchable game the one on national TV?
What counts as national TV
Each game in our data carries one listed network. There's no flag that says "national", so I drew the line myself and kept it conservative. A game counts as national only if its listed network is one of these:
- NFL: NBC, ESPN, ABC, Prime Video, Netflix, NFL Network. That's Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night and the stand-alone streaming games. Sunday afternoon games on CBS and Fox count as not national, because most of them only air in part of the country.
- NBA: ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, Prime Video. NBA TV, League Pass and regional networks are not national here.
- NHL: ESPN, ABC, TNT, truTV. I left out ESPN+, Disney+ and NHL Network. ESPN+ carries hundreds of out-of-market games, so counting it would make almost every game "national".
- MLB: Fox, FS1, TBS, ESPN, NBC, Peacock, Apple TV, Netflix. Postseason games are left out of the comparison, since every one of them is national.
- College football: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN. ESPN2, FS1, CBS Sports Network, the conference networks and streaming services are not national here.
College basketball only tipped off this month, and only a handful of games so far have been on the big networks, so I left it out.
How often each group cleared the bar
"Cleared the bar" means the game ended up rated worth watching in the app, judged on how it actually played out.
| League | National TV games | Cleared the bar | Everything else | Cleared the bar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| College football | 153 | 37% | 527 | 12% |
| NBA | 21 | 57% | 139 | 24% |
| NFL | 33 | 55% | 103 | 50% |
| NHL | 24 | 21% | 268 | 16% |
| MLB (September) | 11 | 5 of 11 | 349 | 39% |
College football is where the networks look smartest, and that makes sense. The sport has more than 130 top-level teams and huge gaps between them. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and ESPN get first pick of the ranked matchups and conference games that matter, and the rest of the slate is full of mismatches. A national game was about three times as likely to be worth watching.
The NBA tells a similar story on a small sample. It's early, and national windows go to contenders and stars.
The NFL is the interesting one. Prime-time games cleared the bar only a little more often than Sunday afternoon games. That's parity doing its job: in a league where most games are close, a 1 p.m. regional game is nearly as likely to be good as the Sunday night game.
The NHL shows almost no gap. National games cleared the bar 21% of the time and everything else 16%, but that's five national games out of 24, and one game fewer would wipe out most of the difference. Hockey is low scoring and a lot of games are one-goal affairs late, so where a game airs says little about how it plays.
MLB had only 11 national regular-season games in September, too few to read anything into.
Was the night's best game on national TV?
The second question is the one that matters on the couch. For each day with at least one national game and at least one other game, I took the single most watchable game and checked where it aired. For the NFL I grouped by week instead of by day, since Monday and Thursday usually have one game each.
| League | Days (or weeks) | Best game was national | Share of games that were national |
|---|---|---|---|
| College football | 28 days | 19 (68%) | 23% |
| NBA | 8 nights | 5 (63%) | 21% |
| NFL | 9 weeks | 3 (33%) | 24% |
| NHL | 14 nights | 3 (21%) | 28% |
| MLB (September) | 7 days | 2 of 7 | 11% |
The last column is the fair comparison. If networks picked at random, the best game would be national about as often as national games make up the slate. In college football and the NBA, the national game was the best one roughly three times as often as chance. In the NFL it was only a bit better than chance: six weeks out of nine, the best game of the week was a Sunday afternoon regional game. In the NHL the national game was the best game of the night less often than chance would predict.
Three great games outside the national windows
- Chiefs at Broncos, November 1 (CBS). Denver beat Kansas City 28-24 in a division game, coming back from 11 points down in the fourth quarter.
- Texas State at Boise State, October 31 (CW). Boise State won 46-45 after giving up a big lead, with the go-ahead touchdown inside the last three minutes.
- Timberwolves at Cavaliers, October 26 (League Pass). Cleveland won 127-125, a two-point finish. You needed League Pass or a local cable package to see it.
Caveats
- Each game has one listed network. Some games air on more than one, and a game listed on a regional network may also have had a national simulcast.
- National TV is itself one of the things we weigh, so national games get a small built-in lift in this comparison. That makes the NFL and NHL results more telling, not less.
- Ratings here use our scoring as of November 12, which gives regular-season overtime and early upset leads less weight than it used to.
- These are two months of one season. The NBA and MLB samples are small.
How The Lineup Is treats this
National TV is one of the 11 things the app looks at when it rates a game, alongside rankings, rivalry, close game, star power and the rest. As How it works puts it, when a game is picked for national television, the people who make those calls have already decided it's worth watching, and "we factor that in, without letting it dominate."
The numbers above are why it can't dominate. A network's pick is a decent guess made in advance. It's a strong guess in college football, a weak one in the NFL and close to no guess at all in the NHL. Once the game starts, what happens on the field matters far more than where it airs. The app also shows each game's network, so you can see what's on your TV and what's on a service you don't have. You can see tonight's games ranked on the tonight page.
The Lineup Is is an iPhone app that ranks every game by whether it's worth watching and tells you when one gets good.
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