On Sunday, an NFL playoff game between the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints was aired simultaneously on CBS and Nickelodeon, with the former being a traditional broadcast and the latter being a children’s version with some sophisticated graphics and Nickelodeon cameos designed to make the traditionally monotonous and unnecessarily complex sport of football look more appealing to children. From an aesthetic point of view, the experiment was an absolute success. Virtual slime cannons appear on the screen when teams receive touchdowns, player stats cards include references to their favorite Nickelodeon shows, and SpongeBob SquarePants appear during goal attempts. In addition, someone in the field said “fuck it” at one point, and everyone in Nick’s broadcast had to clumsily pretend that it didn’t.
It turns out that the special broadcast was also a success from an audience point of view, with The wrap communicating that the NFL game gave Nickelodeon its highest ratings in “almost four years”. In fact, combined with the CBS broadcast, the game was the most watched match of the weekend and had just over 30 million views … 28 million of which came from CBS. So yes, the Nickelodeon version of the game apparently didn’t show particularly large numbers when compared to a regular football game, but that’s probably just because traditionalists still haven’t realized how much Best football games are when SpongeBob and the cast of All this are there (new All this, not the one you remember if you’re old enough to read this). ESPN have a good article about how and why Nickelodeon’s game was so much better than regular football, despite the fact that the game itself was apparently “terrible”.
We suggested on Sunday that it would probably be more fun to just talk about Sponge Bob Square Pants than complicating it all with soccer balls, but apparently something about adding football to the equation helped elevate this thing beyond a normal Nickelodeon day.