ESPN’s $167.5 Million Booth Bet Unlikely to Shake Up NFL TV Ratings
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In spiriting away Joe Buck and Troy Aikman from Fox Sports, ESPN has not only utterly transformed its Monday Night Football booth, but it has punched a ragged hole in its rival’s Sunday afternoon NFL showcase. And while both sides can make a case for having made all the right moves, the tectonic talent shift probably won’t have an outsized impact on the fall ratings scorecard.
While there will be much scrutiny as to how the Buck-Aikman transplant takes, establishing causality is next to impossible when it comes to gauging the impact a broadcast crew has on the Nielsen ratings. As sports ad sales execs never tire of saying, there’s no evidence that any booth combination since the halcyon days of Pat Summerall-John Madden has had a material impact on the size of the NFL TV audience.
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And given the considerable schedule upgrade ESPN is about to enjoy in advance of its new media-rights deal, next season’s ratings likely would have improved even if Steve Levy, Brian Griese and Louis Riddick had remained on the case.
More to the point, ESPN sibling ABC now has a tested NFL crew in place when the Super Bowl returns to the Eye Network in 2026. The last time ABC hosted the Big Game was back in 2006, when the Steelers topped the Seahawks in front of 90.7 million viewers. Al Michaels and Madden called Super Bowl XL for ABC, which took place such a long time ago that the average cost of an in-game ad was just $2.5 million. (Michaels has been in talks to lead Amazon’s NFL coverage, but a deal has yet to be reached.)
Also of considerable interest to Nielsen scoreboard watchers is the ManningCast, which put up decent numbers in its first year as an alternative to the flagship MNF telecast. Hosted by Payton Manning and Eli Manning, the freewheeling show averaged 1.59 million viewers on ESPN2, accounting for 12% of the Bristol’s overall NFL deliveries.
It goes without saying that ESPN is paying the Mannings a bucketload of cash to put…
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Source : yahoo
