Dick Ebersol was ready to change his life. Not only his, but the lives of every American football fan. And their spouses.
Having arrived safely at Centennial Airport in late November 2004, Ebersol slept comfortably at a nearby hotel, then made the short trip the next morning to Dove Valley for an all-day meeting with Broncos owner and NFL broadcast committee chairman Pat Bowlen.
When that meeting adjourned, Ebersol was so filled with joy he could have skipped away from the Broncos headquarters. For the first time since the Broncos stunned the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XXXII, on Jan. 25, 1998, it appeared Ebersol and his NBC network would be returning to the NFL.
Bowlen was convinced the only way the league could rehabilitate its deteriorating prime-time product on Monday night was to enhance its matchups. The only way to better the odds of televising a game between two decent teams was to employ a flexible schedule.
And the ability to change games in midstream would only work if the NFL – gasp! – moved its primary game of the week from Monday night to Sunday night.
“For all intents and purposes, Sunday Night Football was born in Centennial on Monday, the 22nd of November, 2004,” said Ebersol, chairman of the NBC Sports division that had been without the NFL since the day forever stamped with John Elway’s “helicopter” play. “It was on that visit that Pat told me for the first time he was completely prepared to move forward with the premier product of the league moving off of Monday to Sunday.
“I left Denver that afternoon believing for the first time that we might be back in football.”
Six days later, on Nov. 28, 2004, Ebersol experienced the cruelest of fates.
His chartered jet crashed during takeoff near Telluride, killing three people, including his youngest son, Teddy, 14. Ebersol suffered injuries so serious he was hospitalized for 11 weeks, although he and crash investigators believe he would have died, too, if not for the heroic rescue efforts of his son Charlie.
Back to work
The NFL did not come about “Sunday Night Football” easily.
If all goes well for the NFL, its new prime-time Sunday package will mean many things to many people. Eventually, the NFL hopes an entire American culture that for 36 years had been programmed for Howard Cosell, Dennis Miller, John Madden and Monday night will revert back 24 hours and make Sunday night a top priority. There are critics within this vast culture who say: good luck.
To accomplish this ambitious goal, the NFL set out to convince its most devoted audience sect that the primary game and the best game no longer will be a contradiction, thanks to a newly authorized late-season flex schedule.
Understanding its pigskin-crazed followers cannot be sold on football alone, the NFL is appealing to another audience. There is no reason, honey, to become desperate housewives, not when the prime-time games are starting 20 minutes earlier than in past years.
For Ebersol, “Sunday Night Football” meant so much more. It represented his path back to the human race.
“I had been in the hospital about nine weeks after the crash when I picked up the phone and made my first business call,” Ebersol said.
It was to Bowlen. After a 45-minute chat between friends, the subject of “Sunday Night Football” was mentioned. Business is business, after all.
Will it work?
“I think they’ve got an uphill climb,” said Joe Buck, Fox’s lead NFL play-by-play announcer. “The deck is stacked in their favor schedule-wise, but I think Sunday night is a continuation of a long, long day of football. I think they’ll do a great job. I think their presentation will be great. But I think it’s asking a lot of the viewer to turn in Monday night-like numbers.”
Bowlen and Ebersol understand viewer fatigue is their primary challenge to selling the Sunday night package. Their hope, on a typical Sunday, is that fans will watch their home team play either the early or mid-afternoon game, skip the other game, and find the prime-time matchup too alluring to ignore. If our Sunday couch potatoes can sit for three games, so be it.
If not, the NFL had little choice, anyway, not with the debacle that was the “Monday Night Football” schedule in the season’s final month the past few years. The last 10 consecutive December dates on “Monday Night Football” dating back to 2003 failed to include one game between teams with winning records. Nothing kills ratings momentum like 4-9 Baltimore taking on 3-10 Green Bay.
“They went from what would have been one of the highest ratings in the last 10 years to the lowest rating in ‘Monday Night’ history,” Ebersol said regarding last season. “Just from those last four weeks in what is arguably the most important month of the season. That can’t happen.”
Bowlen, along with future commissioner Roger Goodell, believed it was time to advance the flexible prime-time schedule from its discussion stage.
The greatest deterrent? A flex schedule would not work on Monday night because moving a game originally set for Sunday on 12 days’ notice would create a logistical nightmare. Never mind preparation hassles for the team. Fans have plans, too. And good luck canceling and rebooking a block of 100-some guests on short notice at a big-city, four-star hotel.
By moving the prime-time game to Sunday night, a team would only be inconvenienced, at worst, by having its game moved back seven hours. Sunday night became the flex schedule answer.
Staying flexible
In most seasons, the flex schedule will be employed from Week 10 to 17. But because Week 16 falls on Christmas Day this year, NBC locked in the Dallas Cowboys and Terrell Owens against Owens’ former Philadelphia Eagles.
As for Week 10 through 15 and Week 17, NBC and the NFL will have their pick of games already on the Sunday schedule, provided those games are not protected by other networks.
A tentative Sunday night flex schedule is in place, and the Broncos’ home game against the Seattle Seahawks in Week 13, currently listed as a 2:15 p.m. start, is on it. But the key term is tentative. Should either the Broncos or Seahawks falter by Week 11, NBC and the league reserve the right to choose a more enticing game.
“Monday Night Football” on ABC never had that option.
“I think ABC and Monday night had become an also-ran for a host of reasons,” Bowlen said. “Monday night is not like back in the ’70s and the ’80s when everybody was home for dinner. It’s not the same society. But Sunday night was a night where we should have the big kaboom. That’s when people are home.”
Bowlen may be right about Sunday being family night, but according to Nielsen Media Research, there are roughly 2 million more viewers on Monday night than Sunday.
No blocking dummies when it comes to generating revenue, the NFL was not about to completely turn over the Monday night viewer market. ESPN, which had been carrying a Sunday night game – often to ratings as uninspired as their matchups – agreed to pay $1.1 billion a year for the pleasure of producing a game standing all by its lonesome on Monday night.
“The machine, the mechanism that is the National Football League, for 36 years has cleared Monday night as the special night in the NFL,” said Joe Theismann, ESPN’s prime-time color commentator. “Sunday night is not the last game of the week – Monday night is. So if somebody wants to try and make something out of something else, I think that’s wonderful. But everybody’s going to decide how and why and when they’re going to watch football. I only know we’re thrilled to death to be doing ‘Monday Night Football’.”
In the end, not even the mighty NFL can arrange a perfect prime-time package. Perfection would be a flex schedule for Monday night. Deemed impractical, the NFL was left to choose between the lesser of two evils – the risk of a bad game at an otherwise great time or the likelihood of a good game all day, all the time.
That the league prioritized quality of game may be laudable in its application. But when it comes to execution, the TV entertainment business is measured foremost in ratings.
“Somebody from our network did a study and found the flex schedule would only mean a 3 percent difference (in ratings), but we’ll see,” said Mike Pearl, executive producer of ABC Sports, whose network declined the shift to Sunday in part because it already had hit shows in “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy” that night. “I think the most fascinating element to this Sunday night-Monday night hubbub is the P.R. spin each of the networks will put out once the ratings come in. By the time everybody’s put their spin on it, we’ll be led to believe 8 billion people watch football every week.”
The sarcasm was intentional. The world’s population is roughly 6.5 billion, with nearly 300 million coming from the United States. A fair percentage of the latter number figures to be ready for some football. The question is, will an intriguing matchup make them ready for even more football on Sunday night?
Staff writer Mike Klis can be reached at 303-954-1055 or mklis@denverpost.com.
