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If NFL executives were hoping for relief after six weeks of tanking TV ratings, they'll have to keep on waiting.

After the season's seventh week, NFL ratings are still down -- in some cases they're waydown, despite optimistic headlines you may have read earlier this week. The question now: Is there any end in sight for the skid that has many asking uncomfortable questions about America's most dominant pro sports league?

Sunday Night Footballlast weekend featured a matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals that included punts and penalties galore before a pair of botched field goals in overtime produced a 6-6 tie. That's right -- the Seahawks and Cardinals tied. With six points apiece. In overtime.

Still, you may have seen headlines on Monday proclaiming that Sunday Night Footballratings actually improved with that game. Seahawks-Cardinals did in fact outdraw the previous week's Sunday Night Footballmatchup between the Indianapolis Colts and Houston Texans -- but that obscures the real story.

Seahawks-Cardinals this week drew 17.7 million viewers, according to a season-long tracker compiled by Sports Media Watch. That's 4.1 million more than Colts-Texans drew a week prior -- now here comes the "but."

Compare Seahawks-Cardinals to the corresponding Sunday Night Football broadcast during the seventh week of lastseason and you get a much different picture -- its audience dipped 14%. The audience for Colts-Texans, meanwhile, plummeted a whopping 40% compared to its corresponding broadcast last season.

The mighty NFL finds itself in unfamiliar territory in 2016. A decrease in year-to-year viewership for one of its signature broadcast slots during the heart of the season can be spun as a mildly positive thing because -- hey, a dip's better than a plummet!

Depressed viewership has been the case week after week after week this year. A scroll through Sports Media Watch's season-long compilation shows the trend in stark form -- red boxes connoting declines outnumber green boxes signifying upticks at a rate of about 4-to-1. In many cases the games that fail to measure up to their corresponding broadcasts from 2015 have massive audience craters; meanwhile, the 2016 games that manage to out-perform their 2015 counterparts more often than not do so by only a modest percentage.

It's true for Monday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Sunday day games and Thursday night games alike. It's true for games on NFL Network, ESPN, Fox, CBS and NBC. It's true for games that have had to compete with presidential debates, and for games that ostensibly have had little competition for TV eyeballs.

So what is going on?

An NFL spokesman declined to answer our questions about the TV viewership decline, but league commissioner Roger Goodell addressed the issue at a press conference during a meeting for team owners in Houston last week.

"There are a lot of factors to be considered," Goodell said. "We don't make excuses. We look at it and we try to figure out what's changing. You're touching on a point that is significant which is consumer changes in their behavior and the way they consume media. That's something we've been focused on for several years and it's why we've been doing more with Snapchat and Youtube and others."

But when it comes to making money, Goodell acknowledged that national TV games remain the big kahuna.

"We recognize that network television is still dominant and we believe it's going to be dominant going forward," he said in Houston. "And it's where the vast majority of our fans view our games. It's a great experience, the advertising market is incredibly strong, and I think that our ratings are something that we'll continue to look at and make sure we're doing everything not just to get them to tune in, but to get them to stay tuned in. That's the issue, that's what we'll work on."

The NFL has been an engine of cultural controversy for three season now, ever since Ray Rice blew open its still-lingering domestic violence crisis. Even as the Rice saga unfolded in 2014, though, viewership remained strong.

Observers and analysts have pointed to a number of potential scapegoats for the TV-viewing decline that shows no sign of abating seven weeks into this season.

A half-season of depressed ratings certainly does not a full-blown crisis make. NFL games are still extremely valuable advertising real estate. But the league's steady succession of controversies coupled with this season's TV numbers are enough to wonder for the first time if the NFL could find itself overtaken as America's top dog relatively soon.

Potential reasons cited include (take a deep breath now): this year's spectacle of a presidential election, antipathy over the league's insistently fining players for celebrating big plays, anger over the league's domestic violence crisis, an inexplicable shortage of marquee stars right now, cord-cutting Millennials, players protesting the national anthem, poor officiating and an over-saturation of games and related content.

With election day in less that two weeks, one of those potential scapegoats will soon fly out the window.

If ratings then continue to lag after the Nov. 8 election like they have so far this season, the NFL will find itself struggling even more to answer some very hard questions.

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