NEW ORLEANS — Nationally, the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams delivered the lowest rated Super Bowl in a decade, and New Orleans certainly played their role in that.
Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta was the lowest rated championship game since 2009.
Last year, Super Bowl LII received a 52.4 rating in the Nielsen rating system in 2018 in New Orleans, a huge viewership. This year, that rating was cut in half: 26.1.
For those who don’t know, a company named Nielsen attaches a device to certain TV sets to monitor what viewers are watching. It’s only a certain number of households that agreed to it and what those sample homes watch is what gets converted into a rating.
The New Orleans TV market is made up of 12 parishes around the city and multiple homes in each of those parishes are part of that survey.
For the New Orleans market to plummet from 52.4 to 26.1 in one year means one thing: The Boycott worked. That is less than half of the audience locally watching the Super Bowl this year.
There have been reports that this was the lowest rated Super Bowl in New Orleans ever, but that’s not technically true.
Super Bowl XI was played at Tulane Stadium in 1977 but was actually blacked out in New Orleans, not shown on TV here at all, because the game wasn’t sold out.
And before Nielsen was attaching devices to televisions, they did their ratings by diaries. People would actually write down what they watch, but they would only doing it during designated ratings periods.
They did this in February every year but not January. So, there was never any ratings recorded for the first 14 Super Bowls because they were played outside of that ratings period.
So to say the it was the lowest rated ever in New Orleans? The truth is there’s no way to tell.
But the bottom line is that New Orleans said they wouldn’t watch, and they didn’t