The NFL has announced more Brazil games, this time in Rio. Plus: a new role for ESPN’s Emily Kaplan, another afternoon timeslot for the NCAA women’s basketball title game, and the end of a TV era for the Seattle Mariners.
NFL announces Rio games
The NFL announced Friday that it will schedule three games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, over the next five seasons, with the first game taking place next season. The league has held games in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the past two seasons.
No date for next season’s game was announced. The Sao Paulo games the past two seasons both took place on the Friday of Week 1, but that was only possible due to a calendar quirk that allowed the league to bypass legal prohibitions on Friday and Saturday night telecasts during the high school and college football seasons. There will be no such calendar quirk next year, and NFL executive Hans Schroeder confirmed earlier this month that the league does not plan to schedule a Friday night game in Week 1 next season.
The Rio games are part of an expanding slate of international NFL contests that next season will also include the league’s first game in Australia. The NFL, which per commissioner Roger Goodell is hoping to begin renegotiating its media rights deals as soon as next year, is widely expected to sell a package of international games.
ESPN’s Kaplan taking on new ‘insider’ role
ESPN NHL reporter Emily Kaplan will shift to a new ‘insider’ role this season, akin to that held by Adam Schefter on the NFL, Shams Charania on the NBA and Jeff Passan on baseball, Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports was first to report Friday.
Kaplan, who has been ESPN’s lead “Inside the Glass” reporter since the network resumed airing NHL games in 2021, will still appear in that role for big games, including Opening Night. It is too early to know whether that role will include the Stanley Cup Final, which ABC will carry this season. She was part of the Cup Final broadcast team the past two times ABC aired the event, joining Sean McDonough and Ray Ferraro.
But Kaplan will appear more often in-studio this season than on games, including from a home studio set-up a la Schefter, Charania and Passan. Even with her reduction in game assignments, the new role will have her appearing more often on ESPN this season than in past years.
While ESPN has not previously had an NHL version of the modern ‘insider’ role, the network did regularly feature E.J. Hradek on its studio shows during its previous run with the NHL.
NCAA women’s title game remains in afternoon slot
The NCAA women’s basketball national championship is officially set for 3:30 PM ET on ABC Sunday, April 5, marking the fourth-straight year that the game will air in a midday window. The 3:30 PM start time is a half-hour later than the 3 PM start of the past two years.
Prior to moving to ABC in 2023, the women’s national title game aired in the evening or primetime hours in each year from 1996-2022. The game aired on ESPN in each of those years, including a 15-year run on Tuesday nights from 2002-16.
When ESPN initially announced in 2022 that ABC would air the title game, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus explained the afternoon timeslot to Richard Deitsch of The Athletic: “Prime time on Sunday is a big night of entertainment for the broadcast network, and they have made commitments, in this case to ‘American Idol,’ that go out for many, many years. … We’re getting the best of both worlds here, honestly, by having a championship in the late afternoon, leading into their news coverage and then their prime-time lineup on Sunday night.”
Sunday viewership figures tend to be highest in the late afternoon hours (a bit later than 3:30 ET, but earlier than primetime). The 4:25 PM ET NFL window is generally the most-watched in a given week. Next year’s title game coincides with the Easter Sunday holiday, which in the Nielsen out-of-home era has become a day of elevated sports viewing.
Mariners RSN set to shutter, with MLB to take over production
The Seattle Mariners-owned RSN ROOT Sports will cease operations after Sunday’s regular season finale and Major League Baseball will take over production and distribution of the team’s games next season, the team told the Seattle Times Friday.
The Mariners would be the sixth MLB team whose games are produced and distributed to Major League Baseball. The other five — the Guardians, Padres, Twins, Diamondbacks and Rockies — will reportedly have their games distributed through ESPN as part of the network’s new three-year MLB rights deal. It is not clear whether the Mariners will also end up being included in the ESPN deal, which has yet to be made official.
The Brewers would have been a seventh club, but after initially agreeing to cede their rights to MLB, the club reached a new deal prior to the start of this season to remain with FanDuel Sports Network.
Taking a longer-term view, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said last week that he expects that rights to all 30 clubs will be available in 2028, when the league wants to centralize its local rights.
