Fanatics Flag Football Classic draws 650,000 viewers on Fox
Flag football has a long way to go to match the appeal of tackle football. Beyond the fact that the stands at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles were far from filled (then again, the event was hastily relocated from Saudi Arabia), the national broadcast on Fox generated an audience, on average, of 650,000 viewers , via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal . The telecast peaked at 909,000.
The four-game flag football tournament competed with the second round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and the first round of the NCAA women's basketball tournament. The flag football event did well on social media, with (per SBJ ) a global audience of 300 million. (It's unclear how that number was determined.
) And, frankly, the involvement of the U. S. men's national flag football team made the event far more compelling.
They were added when it was moved from Riyadh to L. A. It creates many interesting storylines, to which PFT readers responded.
Still, as the NFL hopes to leverage flag football into expanded international interest in the sport, there's plenty of work to be done to get the domestic audience to engage. Maybe that means, as Tom Brady has suggested, tweaking the rules to make flag football look more like football football .