Various reports emerged on Wednesday regarding the short- and long-term future of Good Morning Football, NFL Network’s studio show that launched in 2016. In an effort to better understand the situation, we asked the league for both confirmation and elaboration.
Here’s what we found out.
The show will move from New York to Los Angeles.
The show will go dark on March 29, and it “will relaunch later in the summer or preseason.” (That’s a long time to be off.)
A second, separate show will be produced and syndicated through Sony Pictures Television. Syndication deals are “currently in process.”
The syndicated show will have a different name. It’s unclear whether it will have the same or different cast and/or crew.
The hours of the new show have not officially been determined. Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the show could be shrunken from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. ET to 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. ET, especially since a separate, two-hour show will be recorded and syndicated.
Whether this is good news or bad news is a matter of interpretation. Obviously, it represents a massive overhaul of an operation that was launched in New York in 2016. The last time the NFL had a morning show that originated in California but started at 6:00 a.m. ET (NFL AM, in 2012), it was a struggle, to say the least.
For Good Morning Football, the new production likely will commence at 5:00 a.m. local time. Presumably, people will need to show up an hour or two before that. Which will make for an abnormal existence for anyone working on the show.
It feels like certain stray facts were leaked without further context, in order to spin the development as a positive. For the people who work on the show, it might be the exact opposite. Especially since the syndicated show will have a different name — and especially if it has a different cast and crew.
If not, they’ll be generating content for four hours per day, not three.
We’ll see where it goes from here. The inescapable conclusion is that Big Shield is looking to save big money by shutting down New York production and subsuming the show within the facilities the league uses free of charge at the campus of Stan Kroenke’s SoFi Stadium. The end result is that GMFB is basically concluding its run in 23 days and restarting at a date TBD as something that might look and feel dramatically different.