For the second-straight year, the NFL is beefing up ESPN’s Monday Night Football schedule with additional ABC simulcasts.
ABC will carry six additional Monday Night Football games this season, starting with Bills-Jets this coming Monday, it was announced Friday. Ravens-Buccaneers the following week, Buccaneers-Chiefs in Week 9, Texans-Cowboys in Week 11, Ravens-Chargers in Week 12 and Saints-Packers in Week 16 are the additional simulcasts.
The network was originally scheduled for six simulcasts and nine games total.
Though the additional games are technically a one-time arrangement between the NFL and ESPN, it should be noted that ABC has now added a significant number of simulcasts in consecutive years. Last season, the network ended up carrying MNF in every week of the season due to the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, and the result was the most-watched season of MNF in 23 years.
The decision to scale back ABC’s schedule this season was in part because of strident opposition from the other networks, who believed that the additional viewership generated by the ABC games reduced the value of their own ad inventory.
At the same time, reducing the number of ABC simulcasts was inevitably going to impact the ratings for MNF. This past Monday, ESPN and ESPN2 aired the most-watched cable-exclusive Monday night game in five years, and viewership still trailed last season’s equivalent ABC simulcast.
Between the newly announced simulcasts and games that were already scheduled, ABC is set to carry MNF in each of the next four weeks, six of the next seven and 11 of the remaining 13. Through the end of the regular season, the only weeks in which ABC will not carry a game are Week 10 — the week after the presidential election — and Week 13.
As a result, ESPN will end up with only four exclusive nights of MNF this season — Week 2, Week 5 and the aforementioned 10 and 13.
