WHOA

New Orleans Boycott Put Dent in Super Bowl Ratings

Thousands of Saints fans held a protest instead of watching the game after bad refereeing in the NFC championship.

Super Bowl LIII earned a 26.1 overnight Nielsen rating in New Orleans, the lowest of any market in America and the lowest ever in The Big Easy, NOLA.com reports. That number means just over a quarter of households with televisions in the metro region tuned in to Sunday’s game. The city’s low viewership was reportedly deliberate: Many Saints fans boycotted the game in response to the Saints’ loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the N.F.C. Championship game last month, which came after a blown call allowed the Rams to send the game into overtime. N.F.L. commissioner Roger Goodell later conceded that the call was blown. Thousands of Saints fans reportedly held a protest parade in the French Quarter instead of watching the game on Sunday. CBS said Monday that 98.2 million people had watched the New England Patriots defeat the Rams 13-3 on the network, the smallest television audience since 2008, when the New York Giants trumped the Patriots. That’s a 5 percent drop from last year, when 103.4 million people tuned into the game on NBC, and a 12 percent drop from 2017, when 111.3 million people watched it on Fox, The New York Times reports. CBS said it set a digital viewership record of 2.6 million people streaming the event.

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Super Bowl LIII Was Good for the Jews

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