When a Stinker of a Game Still Draws 16 Million Eyeballs: What the Falcons-Packers Ratings Tell Us About Prime Video's Grip on Football

You know what I love about football? Everything. I love it when it's beautiful and I love it when it's ugly, because here's the thing about ugly football, you gotta watch it anyway. You just gotta know what you're looking at. So when I tell you that 16.2 million people tuned in on Prime Video to watch the Atlanta Falcons and Green Bay Packers play what was essentially a game that wouldn't make the highlight reel of a high school tape review, well now, that tells you something important about where we are in this sport. That tells you something about what people will do when the game is put right in front of them on a platform that's becoming easier to access than turning on a television set.

Let me be real with you. That game was about as appetizing as a cold hot dog that's been sitting in the parking lot sun for three hours. The Falcons couldn't get nothing done that mattered. The Packers weren't exactly putting on a clinic. It was one of those games where you watch grown men in expensive uniforms move a football back and forth and you're thinking, "Well, I've seen better football at the county fair between the marching bands." But here we were, 16.2 million viewers on a Thursday night in the middle of the season, all because this is what Prime Video is becoming in the television landscape. This is what happens when a streaming service gets its hooks into the National Football League.

Now I want to talk about something that's been rattling around in my brain for a while now, and this game is a perfect example of it. We're living in a time where the platform matters as much as, maybe even more than, what's happening on the field. You could've had the greatest football game ever played, and if it was on some obscure cable channel that half the country doesn't subscribe to, you'd get maybe eight million viewers. But you put a mediocre, plodding football game on Prime Video, where everybody's already got access because they're ordering their socks and their kitchen sponges and their toilet paper from Amazon anyway, well suddenly you're pulling in numbers that would've made the old ABC Monday Night Football broadcasts look at their Rolodex.

Think back to 1970 when Monday Night Football started on ABC. That was revolutionary. That was prime time. That was appointment television. Dandy Don Meredith and Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell, those guys could make you watch a football game on a Monday night when you should've been working or sleeping or doing literally anything else. They had gravitas. They had style. They had personality. And you know what? They didn't need a platform that was also selling you next day delivery on underwear. They just had the game, and people came because football was THE thing to watch.

Fast forward to now, and we've got Jeff Bezos in the background somewhere, Amazon Prime Video in the front, and the casual fan who's already got the app for shopping logging in to see what this football thing is all about. That's 16.2 million people. That's not all diehard Packers fans or Falcons diehards. That's people who've already got the access, so why not see what's on? And I'll tell you what, that's either the best thing that ever happened to football or the worst thing, depending on how you look at it.

The Falcons, bless them, they come into this game and they play like a team that's trying to remember why they love football. The Packers play like a team that's wondering the same thing. The offense looks confused. The defense looks tired. There's penalties here, there's stalls there, and before you know it the game is over and you're checking the score in the bottom left of the screen like you're reading the weather.

But that's exactly the kind of game that works for Prime Video, you understand? Because Prime Video isn't competing with one channel or two channels anymore. They're competing with your whole life. They're competing with your phone, with your work email, with your dinner plans. So they need games where the casual viewer can kind of half pay attention, keep it on the second screen, and not feel like they're missing anything earth shattering. A Falcons-Packers game where it's not really anybody's best day? That works for that model perfectly. It's familiar football, it's got recognizable names, it's got the Packers with all that tradition, and the Falcons with Kirk Cousins who everyone's got an opinion about. You don't need drama. You just need the game.

Now here's what kills me, and I mean this with all the love in my heart for this sport. We're measuring success differently now. Fifteen, twenty years ago, a middling game like this might get three, maybe four million viewers on a cable network. We'd say, "Yeah, that's fine. That's good. Football is strong." And the advertisers and the networks would be happy. Now we've got 16.2 million watching something that wasn't appointment viewing quality, and we're supposed to believe that's a huge win for Prime Video and the NFL. And in some ways it is! It means the audience is there. It means people will watch football if it's convenient. It means streaming is winning the distribution battle.

But I wonder, and I've wondered this for a while, if we're losing something in the process. There's a reason people talk about the great Monday Night Football games from thirty, forty years ago. There's a reason people remember the exact broadcast when they saw something special. It wasn't just the game itself. It was the entire experience of gathering around, of commitment, of knowing you were going to see something that mattered because you were putting aside your whole evening to do it. Now it's easier to watch, which sounds like a win, but easier isn't always better. Easier can sometimes dilute the experience.

The Falcons and Packers didn't put on a show that night. They put on a game. A boring game, truth be told. But 16.2 million people watched it anyway because it was there and it was convenient and the NFL is still the NFL no matter how it looks on any given Thursday. That number should tell both the league and the streaming service that people still care about football, even when football isn't being at its best. But it should also remind us that great games, really truly great games, are what stick with you forever. And if we keep feeding people adequate football in convenient packages, eventually adequate is all anyone expects.

For fans out there, here's why you should care about this whole situation: The way you watch football is changing whether you asked for it or not. Prime Video is here to stay. Thursday night football is being distributed in ways that would've seemed like science fiction fifteen years ago. If you're a cord cutter, this is great for you. If you like having one app that does everything, this is your world. But don't fall asleep on it. Make sure you're still seeking out the great games, the ones that matter, the ones where players and broadcasters and fans all elevate each other. Because 16.2 million people watching a mediocre game means the platform is winning. But are we, as fans, winning? That's the real question we should be asking ourselves.