Michael McCarthy is not sure how one of the most coveted games on the NFL’s Super Wild Card Weekend schedule landed on ESPN. He is using his column at Front Office Sports to make sense of the league putting the Dallas Cowboys’ visit to Tampa Bay ended up on Monday night.
McCarthy asked a series of unnamed TV executives to share their best theories. After all, last year, ESPN landed the Rams and Cardinals in the same spot. Certainly, the league’s most popular team versus its biggest celebrity will draw considerably more eyeballs.
One of the more interesting theories is that the NFL is using this as a “make good” to ESPN. The network essentially lost its last Monday Night Football game of the regular season following Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the field in Cincinnati. One rival TV executive suggests that the NFL is giving the network its top playoff audience to “make up” for that.
For the record, that game was the most watched in the history of Monday Night Football on ESPN, but the network did not tout the ratings or include them in its year end average.
Another executive suggested that ESPN is capable of delivering a different level of star power, one that this game warrants. Between Joe Buck and Troy Aikman calling Monday Night Football and Peyton and Eli Manning anchoring their alternate broadcast, the Disney networks could provide a big game feel that competitors could not.
Disney’s improving relationship with the NFL and the fact that the network pays one of the highest rates for its television package were also mentioned as potential factors. McCarthy himself theorizes that the game is the only one on the schedule capable of being a sort of grand finale to the weekend’s action.
“Even better, the prime-time blockbuster is the only NFL playoff game on the calendar Monday, after a doubleheader Saturday and a tripleheader on Sunday,” he writes. “That means the entire country (including the extended NFL family of players, coaches, and executives) will be tuning in.”
