Jon Gruden, a former Super Bowl champion head coach in the NFL, signed a multiyear deal with Barstool Sports. The hire occurred three years after he resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders following the revelation of emails that contained remarks that were homophobic and misogynistic. Gruden had previously worked at ESPN where he broadcast Monday Night Football games for nine seasons alongside various colleagues, some of whom included Ron Jaworski, Mike Tirico and Sean McDonough.
During the AFC Championship Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills on Sunday night, WFAN co-host Gregg Giannotti saw Gruden watching the game with his colleagues at Barstool Sports. Morning show co-host Boomer Esiason replied that it was evident that Gruden has a disdain for the commercials playing on television. Giannotti added that it seemed the former head coach was “starting to become annoyed” with some aspects of the job. The countenance Gruden portrayed while watching a Taco Bell commercial captured on video conveyed ostensible frustration, resulting in Giannotti making a prediction on the air.
“I bet that after he does the Super Bowl and watches the Super Bowl with those guys, you’re not going to see him watching any more games with those guys,” Giannotti said.
“If State Farm is doing a commercial with Patrick Mahomes and the coach, why not shoot five commercials that day and rotate them?,” Al Dukes, producer of Boomer & Gio on WFAN, said later in the segment. “That’s the problem people have – it’s like the same commercial over and over and over again.”
Earlier in the conversation, Esiason explained that CBS Sports had 69 commercial units for the AFC Championship Game that the company needed to include in the broadcast. As someone who worked on The NFL Today studio show for 22 years, he is aware of how things need to be moved around to ensure these units are successfully executed. Giannotti expanded on the disquiet surrounding commercials by delineating how some consumers view games during the year.
“The other problem is that for the entire regular season, you don’t watch a single commercial,” Giannotti said. “If you’re someone who has RedZone or the Ticket or whatever, you’re just not watching the commercials, and then when you get to standalone games, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is the longest day of my life.’”
Esiason voiced that he would tell Gruden and other players that the commercials are how rightsholders go about making the money back that they invest in NFL broadcasts. Furthermore, he articulated that the league is bringing other broadcast partners into the fold and is trying to expand its schedule to 18 games. When that threshold is reached, Esiason surmises that there will be a full schedule of international games because of the interest in these marketplaces.
“And then on top of that, the NFL then can go and auction of all these games,” Esiason said. “They auction off the Saturday playoff games, they auction off the Friday night after the Thursday night game – that gets auctioned off. It’s an unbelievable business model that the NFL has created and continues to create and continues to generate just gobs and gobs of money.”
Giannotti estimates that the ratings for the AFC Championship Game are going to be massive, contending that it was a compelling matchup until the end and that many people may have been hoping for the Chiefs to lose. The AFC Championship Game last season averaged 55.47 million viewers on CBS when the Chiefs defeated the Baltimore Ravens, earning the right to represent the conference in Super Bowl LVIII. Kansas City will look to become the first team in league history to win three consecutive Super Bowl championships in approximately two weeks against the Philadelphia Eagles. Final ratings and viewership for the NFL Championship Games in the AFC and NFC have yet to be divulged.
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