Hollywood strikes provided an unexpected boost for Monday Night Football in 2024, with all games simulcast on ABC and ESPN.
This year, that won’t be happening.
Via LarryBrownsSports.com, John Ourand of Puck recently reported that MNF will return to its pre-labor unrest schedule, with only five or six games simulcast on ABC and three exclusive ABC games. (The exclusive games presumably will be part of overlapping of simultaneous doubleheaders, which some love and others — me included — do not.)
The end result will be smaller audiences for Monday Night Football.
How it’s presented will be a different issue. The P.R. pros at Disney, whose primary job duties are to put out fires and spin ratings, might try to compare ESPN apples to apples for the non-simulcast weeks. Those numbers generally will be higher, however, since anyone who would have watched on ABC in 2023 will have to watch on ESPN in 2024. Another strategy would be to compare 2024 to 2022, treating 2023 like the aberration it was. (Of course, it wasn’t an aberration last year, when Disney was touting the year-over-year gains without clearly pointing out oh-by-the-way-last-year-the-comparable-game-wasn’t-on-a-three-letter-broadcast-network-too.)
The biggest question could be the impact of the non-simulcasts on the ManningCast, a media darling that frankly isn’t a needle mover. Everyone in the business is required by force of international law to believe the ManningCast is the greatest TV innovation since the remote control. The numbers do not support that view.
And the numbers have been slipping.
The other bump this year could come from Bill Belichick’s recurring appearances. Whiile it’s not easy to calculate the number of times we’ll see a part-time contributor to a part-time show, people who don’t watch the ManningCast because they prefer, you know, the actual game could be more inclined to get real-time insights from one of the greatest coaches who ever lived. Which will be far better than hearing low-hanging “catch the ball!” commentary from whatever celebrity happens to be a fan of one of the two teams.
