OLYMPICS DIVE – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  Hear many people talking about the Olympics?  Neither have I.  They're a bust.  Not only have Americans not done particularly well, but NBC has botched just about everything.

After days of on-air gaffes, trying to cover the Florida shootings from South Korea, and having on-air talent that, in too many cases, didn't measure up, NBC topped it off last night by cutting off ladies' figure skating, the premier audience sport of the winter Olympics, to go to local news.  If you wanted to continue watching the ladies skate, you had to find an obscure sports channel associated with NBC.  I doubt if all TV systems even have it.  If you stuck with NBC, you could get the ladies, on tape, after the locals told us about what was happening in the neighborhoods. 

Brilliant move by NBC.  Tonight the ladies continue.  Let's see if the network can prevail upon the locals to delay their broadcasts so we can watch an entire event.  From Deadline.com: 

Heading into the final days of competition out of PyeongChang and February 25’s closing ceremony, the ratings for NBC out of these games are pretty clearly not going to be making on to any podium Looking on track to be the lowest rated Olympics ever with a drop of about 8% from the previous last place of Sochi 2014, the coverage last night presented mixed results.

With a 12.6/21 metered market rating, last night’s President’s Day primetime coverage on NBC and NBC Sports Network was down 13% from the early numbers , the first Monday of the 2018 Games. That is not a low for the 2018 Games, the hockey saw NBCSN have its best Monday prime since June 2015 and actually represents an overall bop up of 7% from the results of February 18’s primetime NBC and NBCSN airing.

Still, with that breathlessly said, the combo ratings from the two Comcast-owned outlets also saw a 14% drop from the NBC-only primetime coverage of the Sochi Olympics on the comparable night of February 17, 2014.

Having the well-hyped debut of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as its lead-out, that Monday Olympics broadcast of over four years ago went on to snare 23.5 million viewers. Facing some actual worthy competition on the other nets, that was the first time that the tape-delayed games out of Russia topped the mainly live 2010 Olympics from Vancouver for the struggling XXII Winter Olympics.

Up against The Bachelor and Big Brother: Celebrity Edition on the holiday Monday of last night, it appears unlikely we’ll see a similar win in the final numbers today.

As it is, when you just go NBC’18 to NBC’14, last night’s metered market ratings fell 22% from Sochi, one of the harshest drops of these games so far.

COMMENT:  All kinds of reasons will be given.  I think, and it's only my own speculation, that a combination of factors conspired to produce this dismal result.  NBC's many mistakes and lack of flair were probably primary.   A suspicion that the Olympics might be politicized, as was pro football this season, was probably in there as well.  And the lack of recognizable star names in American figure skating played a role.

February 21,  2018