“Monday Night Football” will move to cable, and games on Sunday night will be on free, over-the-air television, if one proposal bounced around between the NFL, ESPN and ABC comes to fruition. Multiple sources said this concept is on the table in preliminary discussions between the NFL and its rights holders, and the league seems just as gung ho on the idea as the Walt Disney-owned networks.
NFL officials have been having preliminary, “sporadic” talks with the networks, exchanging concepts and ideas but not dollar figures, said several highly placed sources at various networks. League officials have had multiple meetings with ESPN, and, testing the cable landscape, also met with a Turner Sports representative last month, sources said.
Many possibilities are being discussed, including the creation of a Thursday night package.
But the scenario that seems to be gaining momentum calls for ESPN to take over the Monday night game, while Sunday nights would be on ABC or another over-the-air network. ABC would possibly end its 35-year run with prime-time football and make a play for an afternoon slot, opening up Sunday prime time for CBS, Fox or the always-lurking NBC.
A Sunday prime-time network game would present possibilities for a flexible schedule, with a top Sunday game from each weekend chosen several weeks in advance as the prime-time game. This would require only a time shift, not moving a game back an entire day.
But the real upside of flipping Monday and Sunday nights, experts say, is that it gives ESPN an even more prestigious piece of real estate. If the Walt Disney Co. is going to pay the freight on an NFL rights fee increase, the reasoning goes, then the most valuable inventory has to go to ESPN. Its dual revenue streams can support “Monday Night Football” better than the struggling ABC, which is said to be losing more money on the NFL than any other network.
As it is, ESPN pays more for the Sunday package than ABC does for Monday night, a reported $4.8 billion over eight years versus $4.4 billion for ABC.
Another advantage of flipping Monday and Sunday nights is that watching football on Monday nights is an established habit for many Americans (12.5 million households per week last year), and the falloff by moving to cable might not be all that sharp. But by making the Sunday night game the premier contest on television each week, it would likely attract a much larger audience than the 6.8 million households ESPN averaged last year for its Sunday night cable games. Ultimately, if the bump on Sunday nights was larger than the falloff on Mondays, the switch would pay off.
Substantive negotiations are not expected to begin until the fall, but the all-important framework is starting to be laid out now.
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said, “We’re always looking for ways to provide even more value to our partners.” He would not comment on any of the specifics.
USTA RE-SIGNS WITH CLEAR CHANNEL: The U.S. Tennis Association has extended its international television representation agreement with
Clear Channel Entertainment for another two years. Clear Channel handles most rights negotiations for the U.S. Open outside the United States, distributing the tournament to 165 countries and generating about $20 million in rights fees per year for the USTA. The deal now goes through 2006.
Clear Channel’s television division also is working on a reality show starring Wimbledon runner-up Andy Roddick, a client of Clear Channel-owned SFX Sports Group. The show, being shopped to networks now, would follow Roddick behind the scenes on the ATP Tour, bringing cameras on a touring bus he’ll share with Mardy Fish and Bob and Mike Bryan (the top-ranked U.S. doubles pair).
“NFL CAYMAN CHALLENGE”: It’s not quite an infomercial, but the Cayman Islands handed the NFL a check to create some co-branded programming, and the result will air on Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on the NFL Network.
The “NFL Cayman Challenge” will pit some of the league’s top players in a series of competitions on the islands’ beaches. In addition to the competition, the one-hour special also will include vignettes about the athletes’ and their families’ vacations on the islands.
Andy Bernstein can be reached at abernstein@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
