NFL vs. NLCS Game 2 ratings show NFL still dominates despite its sagging numbers

The NLCS matchup is Major League Baseball’s dream.

The Chicago Cubs and their World Series drought is the biggest draw baseball could possibly have. The Los Angeles Dodgers, in another huge market with a World Series drought that goes back to 1988, is probably the second-best option as far as ratings go. Especially when superstar pitcher Clayton Kershaw is on the mound, as he was Sunday night.

And with that perfect ratings storm, Game 2 of the NLCS did a rating of a little more than half of a pretty bad Indianapolis Colts-Houston Texans NFL matchup on NBC.

According to NBC, “Sunday Night Football” did a 9.0/15 overnight rating and share — an average of 9 percent of all households in the largest 56 markets and 15 percent of households watching TV at the time as SportsRatingsTV.com explained. The Dodgers-Cubs game did a 5.0/8, according to Michael Mulvihill, Fox Sports executive vice president of research, league operations and strategy.

So the best matchup that baseball could possibly offer — and it was a tense, 1-0 game won by Kershaw and the Dodgers — didn’t come close to beating an NFL game between two mediocre AFC South teams.

That’s the problem with the ongoing angst over the NFL’s ratings decline. Sure, ratings are down, and no company wants to take a step back. It’s understandable why the NFL is concerned about the dip. But the NFL on its worst day still destroys almost anything else on its best day, especially in the sports realm.

The Texans beat the Colts in overtime on Sunday night (AP)

If you want to argue that MLB’s ratings didn’t max out because it was on FS1, that’s fair. But only to a point. It’s 2016, and if people want to find the baseball game there’s a good chance they’ll find it. FS1 is estimated to be in more than 80 million homes, comparable to ESPN.

The headlines will probably shout that the NFL ratings Sunday night were down again — a 38 percent drop from last year’s Week 6 Sunday night game, SportsRatingsTV.com said. That’s accurate, but also needs some perspective. That Week 6 game last year was between the Colts and the New England Patriots, who might be the NFL’s biggest draw outside Dallas, and it was the first meeting of the teams since the deflate-gate scandal. Mulvihill also said the late Fox game (Dallas Cowboys-Green Bay Packers) did a 17.4 rating, which more than triples what baseball did at night (and up 12 percent from last year’s Week 6 late game, Mulvihill said), and Fox’s NFL doubleheader on Sunday averaged 13.6. Those are enormous numbers. Game 7 of last year’s NBA Finals was the most-watched NBA game in ABC history and it did an 18.9 overnight rating. The Miami Heat-San Antonio Spurs NBA Finals Game 7 in 2013 did a 17.7 overnight rating.

The NFL didn’t have a great matchup on Sunday night. It went up against another sporting event that could not have asked for a more perfect matchup, when factoring in combined markets and story lines. And the NFL’s overnight rating was still 80 percent better.

The narrative of the NFL’s declining ratings this season will continue. Just keep in mind that the NFL can take a mighty tumble and still beat anything else.