For Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, having a winning football team is not enough: He wants to make sure his team is seen by as wide an audience as possible.
So according to the Ravens’ website, Bisciotti said he’d “fight like hell” for a home Monday Night Football game, and the league delivered by sending the Bengals to Baltimore for the first Monday night game of the season on September 10.
“They finally listened to me,” Bisciotti said. “I’m thrilled. . . . I think it’s going to be a fantastic weekend for us to open up on Monday night.”
The 2012 NFL schedule gave the Ravens three prime time home games: Week One against the Bengals on Monday night, Week Three against the Patriots on Sunday night and Week Four against the Browns on Thursday night. Bisciotti was less thrilled with that.
“I’m a little disappointed that we got three home games nationally televised and they’re in Week 1, 3 and 4, but that’s just a quirk of the schedule,” Bisciotti said. “[The league] called and apologized that they were all jammed in the beginning of the year.”
The fact that an owner got an apology for something as innocuous as three prime time home games in the first four weeks of the season shows what an impossible task it is to please everyone when putting together the NFL’s schedule. But Bisciotti still has hopes that the Ravens will get another prime time home game later in the season, thanks to the flexible schedule.
“We’ll try and earn one or two more Sunday night games from NBC because of our success,” Bisciotti said.
To earn more prime time games, it’s the players who will have to fight like hell.
