NFL Dominates TV Sports, Even in Games That Don't Matter

NFL exhibition games are such stale, boring affairs that Commissioner Roger Goodell himself has said he wants to shorten the preseason and stop selling the fans a watered down product. And yet the NFL so thoroughly dominates the American television landscape that an NFL exhibition was the highest-rated sports program of the week -- a week when Tiger Woods won a golf tournament, the Yankees whipped the Red Sox and Tony Stewart won a NASCAR race.

Here's the list of the most-watched sports programs of the last week, which the NFL distributed to the media Wednesday after the Nielsen numbers came out:

NBC NFL Preseason (Bills-Titans), 7.9 million viewers
CBS Bridgestone Final Round (Tiger Woods won), 6.3 million viewers
ESPN Sunday Night Baseball (Red Sox-Yankees), 4.7 million viewers
FOX Baseball (Red Sox-Yankees & Rangers-Angels), 4.0 million viewers
ESPN NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (At the Glen), 2.5 million viewers

Obviously, the Hall of Fame Game's status as the first preseason game of the year makes it bigger than other preseason games -- it's not like next week's Browns-Lions exhibition is going to do huge numbers -- but those 7.9 million viewers are a huge statement about how big the NFL is in this country.

Tiger Woods is a superstar whose popularity transcends golf, and Yankees-Red Sox is the national pastime's biggest rivalry, but on American television, football is king.