The Bills saved all of NFL America from the conundrum provoked by the league’s decision, in conjunction with ESPN, to schedule concurrent Monday Night Football games on multiple occasions this season.
The Bills toyed with the Jaguars as if they were a high school team – and a bad one, at that – in the game that started at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN. It became unwatchable for all but Buffalo fans almost before the Commanders’ Austin Siebert kicked off his team’s game at Cincinnati at 8:15 on ABC.
If that exercise had been the last we were to see of concept this season, it might have been tolerable.
Alas, we get three more in ‘24.
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The first is Monday, with a 7:30 p.m. start between the Titans and Dolphins on ESPN and then an 8:15 kickoff for the Seahawks and Lions. In Week 7, it’s the Rams and Buccaneers at 8:15, follwoed by the Chargers and Cardinals at 9. Then in Week 15, it’s Bears-Vikings at 8 p.m. and Falcons-Raiders at 8:30.
As part of the new broadcast contract between the NFL and ESPN/ABC, this Monday Night Mashup concept was introduced to prime time. It’s long been a part of the Sunday schedule, because there are only so many hours in a day during which to televise pro football games.
There always had been something special, though, about the prime time experience. Monday Night Football has an even longer history on American television than NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which is celebrating its golden anniversary this season.
What is it, if it’s not occasion designed to grab the whole of the nation’s attention?
It no longer is unique in that regard. NBC has shown Sunday Night Football since 2006, but its spectacular success is built exactly on the principle that all NFL fans will want to tune into their game at that time.
When ESPN took over the rights to the Monday Night property in 2006, it began opening the season with a true doubleheader: One game starting in the 7 p.m. Eastern hour, the second in the 10 p.m. hour. That was a novel concept that allowed those truly obsessed with the sport and in possession of plenty free time to binge the season’s launch.
What comes Monday serves as an admission that one of those two games is likely to be a bore and requires an alternative to rescue fans.
And it’s apparent the public isn’t enthralled. The Sunday Night Football game involving the Chiefs and Falcons drew an audience of 25 million. The America’s Game of the Week telecast on Fox between the Cowboys and Ravens reached 27 million. And the previous week’s Monday Night matchup of the Falcons and Eagles hit the 15 million mark.
By comparison, last week’s Monday Night Overload drew 19 million viewers between the two games, which were won by the Bills and Commanders. That’s only 8.5 million per game.
Who really thinks this is a good idea?
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It’s one more dent in the treasured Monday Night Football brand. MNF began in September 1970 with a game between the Browns and Giants, as Keith Jackson handled the play-by-play next to analysts Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. A year later, when Frank Gifford became contractually available, he took over calling the games as the stars of Cosell and Meredith ascended.
By its third season, Monday Night Football was such a cultural phenomenon it became a plot device in a memorable episode of “The Bob Newhart Show” – even though that program, in the first season of its classic run, appeared on a competing network.
ESPN recently settled on a standard, high-end football broadcast by drawing in the Joe Buck-Troy Aikman team for a significant amount of money. Those in charge of the broadcast had spent a lot of the past half-century trying to recapture the chemistry of those early MNF years, with some stunning failures along the way, perhaps the most spectacular putting former d-lineman Booger McFarland on a crane that reportedly obscured the view of in-stadium spectators and left him disengaged from his partners calling the game.
No sporting event is reliably great, but we always could count on the game.
If there are two games at once, can we even say that?
