NBC gets Sunday Night Football and Monday Nights move to ESPN. It's probably a smart move by NBC, who now has one less day of the week to worry about prime-time programming. They can hope that NFL gives them synergy with Arena ball as well. ABC's prime time entertainment schedule has been pretty strong this year, so maybe they don't want the interruption of sports.
Since the NFL schedule is already out, I guess Monday nights have more marquee match-ups while Sundays. Strange, since NBC has a bigger market that ESPN. I wonder if the NFL will change the scheduling after next year to reflect this, but I suppose part of that also depends on whether or not ESPN pays more for the Monday Night package. It's not clear what will happen to the "Thursday Night Football" games that used to be part of the Sunday package.
The biggest loser here is John Madden, who left FOX so that he could do Monday Night Football on ABC, and now finds himself without a gig. Al Michaels is a slight loser here as well. I wonder if Marv Albert would return to NBC to do the Sunday night games or if Bob Costas gets a crack at it.
Monday, April 18, 2005
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In fact, NBC gets the Thursday night games as well. The idea is that Monday nights aren't really good for football anymore (MNF ratings have declined for years despite increasing popularity of the NFL), and that Sunday night would actually be a better time for national broadcasts.
Also, one of the not-so-obvious pluses for this change is that the NFL will have flexibility to make midseason schedule changes and move good matchups to the evening game. Changing game time by a few hours is less of a hassle to the teams than changing the game day (thus changing a team's travel itinerary and practice schedule the following week). In theory, this eliminate any meaningless games on prime time late in the season.
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