By Tony Moss, Sports Network NFL Editor
PHILADELPHIA -- The New England Patriots will play the New York Jets the day after Christmas, in what will mark the end of the 35- year spectacle known as Monday Night Football.
ESPN is taking over the Monday night game next season, while NBC will carry the premiere primetime game of the week, only on Sundays.
The official end of Monday Night Football on network television is but the final splash of light in a long, slow sunset that has been at least a decade in its descent. ABC had been complaining for years about the money it was losing on the Monday night game, and tried a variety of bells and whistles, all of which were met with skepticism and/or ambivalence by the viewing public, in an effort to reclaim a measure of its 1970s glory.
With so many cable outlets to distract viewers, the ratings decline that MNF was subject to was little more than a sign of the times. ABC knew when it agreed to pay an annual rights fee of $550 million that it couldn't possibly recoup those dollars in ad revenue. The network was reportedly losing about $150 million a year on the package, and while that money could certainly pay my heating bill for the winter, networks like ABC typically dump $150 million or so on a casual lunch for the cast of According to Jim.
Lest you thought that the four major networks operated like Swarthmore College trying to determine whether or not to drop women's tennis, know this: networks don't buy the rights to NFL games for the money, they buy them for the prestige and promotional potential that comes with owning them. If you're out of the NFL game, as CBS and NBC both found out during different periods of the past decade, you may have more bankroll within the financial coffers, but you're also considered to be at the back of the network sports bus.
And though ABC knew this, and should have realized that having a Top 10 show like MNF was still better than much of the dreck it would be able to put out in its place, executives at the network still thought they could transform the show back into the phenomenon it once was. So it made a series of disastrous decisions in an effort to make the game an en all-encompassing festival of entertainment rather than what it has always been, which is a quality sporting event.
Dennis Miller is a terrific comedian and social commentator, but to think that his high-brow observations were going to make Roscoe from Omaha switch the dial from professional wrestling smacks of a decision made by a bunch of Yale grads in a Manhattan boardroom. Hiring John Madden away from FOX was a step in the right direction, and probably should have been made long before the name "Boomer Esiason" was uttered anywhere in the vicinity of an offseason production meeting.
But the teaming of Madden and the similarly classy Al Michaels was too little, too late,...
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