ABC Drops MNF

Beginning with the 2006 season, ABC will no longer have Monday Night Football. After more than 35 years, the network is dropping its landmark NFL package. ESPN will be taking over on Monday nights, while NBC gets back into professional football (unless you count Notre Dame) by acquiring the Sunday night games.

Ratings have fallen for MNF over the last few years, mostly because some of the matchups have been dogs. Parity in the NFL, and the fact that schedules are made up before the season, has left ABC with several undesirable games over that time.

I’m not going to miss MNF on ABC. As much as I like the NFL, those games start and end too late for me, so unless a team I was really interested in was playing, I rarely stayed up until the end. ESPN is going to start the games 20 minutes earlier, but this is the network that stretches 40 minutes of material into 90 minutes of SportsCenter, so the games will probably end later.

I also haven’t liked most of the announcers on Monday night football, though the current crew of Al Michaels and John Madden has been OK. In fact, I hope that Michaels and Madden move with the show to ESPN, so we can retire the Sunday night crew of Mike Patrick, Joe Theismann and Paul Maguire. I liked them at first, but over the last three years or so, they have been pretty tough to take. Unfortunately, because it’s out of season, it’s hard to give specific examples as to what bugs me about this crew, but it has more to do with the way they talk to each other than about the game. It’s like there’s this lovefest going on, and it seems phony to me, and even if it’s sincere, it’s out of place.

The thing that has always bugged me most about MNF though is its inflated perception of itself. Once again, I can’t remember much in the way of specifics, since we’re not in season, but they always made a big deal of things like how teams, coaches, players, etc did on Monday nights, as if it wasn't a regular season game. Invariably, during each game, some stat or feature would come up about playing on Monday that would make my eyes roll.

Of course, that part of the MNF tradition figures to get worse with the move to ESPN, which has the most hyper-active promotions department of any network. These are the people that give you “Rivalry Week,” “Judgment Week,” “Throwdown Thursday,” and that’s just for college basketball. I dread what they might do to Monday night football.

It’s a busy week for me, so I may not get to write much. The NFL draft is this weekend, and I’ll write some about that later this week for sure.