For at least one year, Monday Night Football is back on ABC full-time.
ABC will carry a Monday Night Football game in every week of the season after adding ten simulcasts that were initially scheduled to air exclusively on ESPN, according to The Athletic and Sports Business Journal. ABC was already scheduled to carry games this week and next, and then again in Weeks 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18.
Per reports, the move is a one-time arrangement due to ongoing strikes by Hollywood writers and actors that have left ABC without any scripted fall programs.
As a result, ESPN will have only three exclusive Monday night games this season, each in weeks when ESPN and ABC are set for a split doubleheader — Saints-Panthers this week, Rams-Bengals next week, and Titans-Dolphins in Week 14.
ABC last carried a full season of Monday Night Football games in 2005. After airing Super Bowl XL in 2006, the network went nearly a full decade before airing another live NFL game. ESPN began simulcasting its annual Wild Card playoff game on ABC in the 2015 season and has steadily increased the amount of NFL inventory on the network in the years since.
It is unclear how many more NFL games ABC will air in future years as Disney weighs the sale of its linear networks (ESPN excluded). Bloomberg reported last week that Disney held talks with Nexstar about a possible sale and received a $10 billion offer from media owner Byron Allen for ABC, Disney’s owned-and-operated local affiliates, and the FX and FXX cable networks. It is not clear how ESPN’s existing rights deals, many of which explicitly call for games on ABC, will account for the network no longer being part of the Disney family.
It is unclear whether ESPN plans to move additional sports programming to ABC during the strikes. ABC is not scheduled to air any NBA games until December or any NHL games until January.
In other MNF news, ESPN said Monday that it will debut a new weekly “anthem” prior to each game in which Chris Stapleton, Snoop Dogg and Cindy Blackman Santana perform a cover of the Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight.” MNF, which inaugurated the pregame “anthem” with Hank Williams Jr., has largely gone without an open in recent years.
(News from Sports Business Journal 9.18)
