ESPN is dropping some of its most troublesome Monday Night Football inventory as part of its new NFL Media deal.
ESPN will discontinue its overlapping Monday Night Football doubleheaders as part of its acquisition of NFL Network, ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro told Richard Deitsch of The Athletic in a piece published Thursday.
While NFL Network will continue to carry its current seven-game schedule, four of those will come from ESPN’s existing game inventory — three ABC-exclusive windows that overlapped with games on ESPN in makeshift doubleheaders, plus the annual ESPN+ exclusive game. The NFL will license three additional game windows to ESPN to fill out that seven-game slate.
Pitaro characterized the change as creating three new exclusive windows for MNF. “We’re getting out of this side-by-side business and moving those three games over. So you’re going from 22 clean windows to now 28 clean windows for NFL games across ESPN networks.”
The overlapping doubleheaders, which began in the 2021 media rights deal, have never done well in the ratings as ABC and ESPN have cannibalized each other. Figuring out how to schedule those games has been a work in progress, with ESPN sometimes having the early window and ABC the late window, or the reverse.
In addition, the ESPN+ exclusive would seem to be of less importance with the streamer taking a backseat to the new ESPN direct-to-subscriber product. That exclusive was not exactly lighting up the ratings either. Last year, it averaged fewer than two million as part of a fourth overlapping doubleheader — airing opposite a game on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 — according to Pro Football Talk.
ESPN will still have one doubleheader per year, the Week 18 Saturday doubleheader that airs in traditional consecutive windows. The network will also still have need for a “B” team — currently Chris Fowler, Dan Orlovsky and Louis Riddick — as it will be producing the seven NFL Network windows.
The changes will likely go into effect next season, though if the regulatory process is protracted in any significant way, one imagines that it would be postponed until the following year.
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