It’s human nature to resist admitting mistakes. The bigger, richer, and more powerful a company is, the less likely it will be to acknowledge an error.
That makes the NFL’s willingness to scrap the Monday Night Football doubleheaders even more significant.
Appearing recently on The Schrager Hour podcast, NFL V.P. of broadcast planning Mike North was surprisingly candid about the league’s decision to declare defeat and retreat.
“Yes, the Monday night doubleheaders are a thing of the past,” North said, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing. “I don’t know why that didn’t work. Quite honestly, I thought it was fine. I thought it was good for us. That Monday night game, if it wasn’t your game on Monday, it would’ve been Sunday at [1:00 p.m. ET], among eight, nine, or 10 other games. You probably weren’t going to watch it anyway. Having it on Monday, a national broadcast . . . it just didn’t work. The fans didn’t appreciate it, and it probably wasn’t a good use of an NFL asset.”
No, the fans didn’t appreciate it. We ran a Twitter poll in 2024, which resulted in an overwhelming 66.9 percent saying so.
While it may have been good for business, there was no good way to do it. Playing the games back to back made for a very late night for many, with the second game starting as late as 10:00 p.m. ET and ending after 1:00 a.m. ET. Overlapping didn’t work, either — largely because ESPN insisted on not having a true firewall between the two games. It often resulted in one game having a live look-in for the other game, with a feed that was ahead of the broadcast of the other game.
The reasoning had appeal. It’s hard to follow a cluster of early Sunday afternoon games. Peeling one away allows more games to be actively consumed.
But standalone games have maximum appeal when they are truly standing alone. So, instead of staging two games on Monday night, the league should just move the other one to Tuesday night or Wednesday night. That’s where the puck is currently moving, with the first-ever Wednesday night opener and the first-ever Blackout Wednesday game.
The best news is that the NFL will, at least at times, listen to external criticism and respond accordingly. It’s not easy for the scrutiny to coalesce, not when the NFL has its hooks so deep into the media outlets that would otherwise offer fair criticism on behalf of fans.
Quite often for the NFL, the only fair criticism is no criticism. In this case, the criticism of the MNF doubleheaders sufficiently resonated and, to its credit, the NFL heard it and responded.
