When the NFL schedule was released in May, many questioned the week two doubleheader on Monday Night Football. The games feature the Tennessee Titans facing the Buffalo Bills and the Minnesota Vikings traveling to Philadelphia to play the Eagles. With start times of 7:15 PM and 8:30 PM, there’s bound to be overlap, and NFL Vice President of Broadcasting Mike North joined WFAN’s Boomer & Gio to set the record straight on the NFL’s thought process, noting it wasn’t an ESPN idea for the doubleheader to overlap.
“When we did the new deals with ESPN and the Disney family, ABC has been getting back in the NFL family over the course of the last couple of years. They’ve been simulcasting the Wild Card game, they’ve been simulcasting a couple of Monday Night Football games, and they wanted a couple of games of their own. So what we talked to them about was what’s the right way to do that?
“You’ll remember, during week one, we’ve been doing the Monday Night doubleheader at 7:00 PM and and 10:15 PM starts. That’s fun. 6 hours of uninterrupted football but that gets pretty late in the East coast, so we talked to Disney this year about trying something different. So we’re gonna try a little overlap. So you’ll get four-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted football with a little bit of overlap. We tried to time it so halftime of the early game coincides with kickoff of the late game and we’ll see what happens. Just like Sunday afternoons, you’ll have games going on. You can flip back and forth, you’ll see highlights, live look-ins, it should be fun for the fans.”
The Titans/Bills game will air on ESPN, while the Vikings/Eagles game can be seen on ABC.
