Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [299]
SEAN McMANUS:
We thought the break-even number was $425 million, and NBC paid $600 million. You can ask them if they’re making or losing money on it, but I know what the economics are, and I know how many more playoff games we have and what our ratings are, and I know that we generate probably 30 percent more rating points each year. So while we looked at it and thought it would make sense for us to go right from Sunday afternoon football to Sunday night football, we just couldn’t get to the level that NBC eventually did.
I believe Disney could have swept in and kept NBC out of the marketplace, but I’m not sure they ever really appreciated—at least to the degree that NBC did—the value of the prime-time network package. They just decided that ESPN was strategically more important to them than the ABC television network—which was no surprise.
MICHAEL EISNER:
By 2004, we had Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, and they had all done very well, but you can’t give up football; it’s The American Pastime, and it would be bad from a PR point of view. So by putting the big franchise, Monday night, on ESPN, we no longer had to have it Monday nights on ABC. It was a fantastic decision worth maybe a billion dollars to the company. So now you had Sunday night on NBC, which is a big loss for them, and Monday night on ESPN.
ESPN goes from a Ping-Pong network and a surfing network, and whatever else they were doing there in the beginning, to the key sports franchise.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Running these broadcast networks without a male delivery system, which is what Monday Night Football is, is really hard to do. ABC may be better positioned given the cross-promotional opportunities that they have within ESPN, but they’ll want back in as well. Every time any of the big four networks has ever lost the football package, they’ve come back in.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
Would we like to pay less? Would we like to have a few more benefits than we had? Sure, as in any negotiation. The good news is, those negotiations continue to come around every few years. And we’re not going anywhere.
Lost in the palaver about Monday night versus Sunday night, and in the widespread astonishment at the $1.1 billion price tag, was the fact that NBC had also acquired the highlight show that preceded each Sunday night game. And that meant an abrupt bye-bye to NFL Primetime, the long-running ESPN institution hosted by Chris Berman.
CHRIS BERMAN:
It was a fuckup of the tenth magnitude. I knew somehow ESPN would maintain their NFL package, which was what we did, but what I didn’t understand was that Primetime was at risk. NBC came in through the bathroom window, to quote Joe Cocker or the Beatles. I didn’t think that the world was going to change, that we—ABC-ESPN—would lose one of the two. I didn’t know that. How could I know? Nobody knew.
MARK SHAPIRO:
All Berman cared about was NFL Primetime. We said, “Chris, we got Monday Night Football! Chris, we got eight years! Chris, we got Spanish language!” All he cared about was that Primetime would go away. That was his showcase. That was his baby. He called Tagliabue. He called Bowlen, trying to save it. Couldn’t do it.
CHRIS BERMAN:
If you put my professional tombstone up, the first sentence would be: “He did NFL Primetime.” First one.
TOM JACKSON:
I cannot remember the exact moment we found out we had lost Primetime, but I knew we were late in the negotiations. It was the loss of something that was very special to Chris. I know that he was disappointed, as I was. There couldn’t have been anyone at our company who didn’t know how important it was. In fact, I can’t imagine there was anybody, including the NFL hierarchy, that was happy about that program disappearing—maybe with the exception of NBC. It certainly was one of those moments where everybody knew that they were losing something; you walk away with one of those feelings like “How could it happen? How could you let this happen?”
CHRIS BERMAN:
That show made football famous. I would always hear, “You guys made me a football fan.