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Muscle strain Strong-arm NFL catches cramp with flexible schedulingPosted: Thursday March 28, 2002 2:22 PM
Well, the 2002 NFL schedule has been released, and turns out it's not as flexible as the league office had hoped. That's because stiff opposition and flexibility rarely co-exist. Just ask Congress. That hot streak that NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue had been riding for the past year or so cooled off a tad Wednesday when the league ran up the white flag on the idea of implementing a flexible TV schedule of games for the final month of the 2002 regular season. Tough luck, ABC's Monday Night Football. Tags tried. For at least another year, your late-season fate (read: ratings) is in the hands of the football gods. If you pull another Tennessee 31, Dallas 0, Christmas-night 2000 stinker from the deck this time around, all we can do is pass the egg nog and hope that John Madden and Al Michaels are on their game. In reality, the league's effort to move late-season games with playoff implications from Sunday afternoon to Monday night -- in an attempt to reverse MNF's steady ratings decline -- probably was doomed the minute that Tagliabue last week let slip that it may happen in 2002.
Missing his mark for the first time in a while, Tagliabue optimistically tossed out flexible scheduling as a possibility for 2002 in an informal post-news conference chat with reporters on the first day of the NFL's annual meeting in Orlando. Network executives at CBS and FOX, the two entities that would lose high-profile games in any potential scheduling trades with ABC, said that Tagliabue's declaration caught them off guard. And furthermore, they still considered the plan akin to having their pocket picked. Which, given that ABC and FOX pay more than $1 billion combined to broadcast NFL games, is somewhat understandable. If the scheduling trades are all about replacing dog games with glamour match-ups on Monday nights, it's hard to make the argument that it can be a "win-win situation," as Tagliabue contended last week. Not as long as ratings still translate in dollars. And remember this: No relationship in all of sports is as sacrosanct as the one that exists between the NFL and its TV network partners. Think Cadillac and the Masters, multiplied by, oh, 1,000 or so. TV money is the NFL's lifeblood, so if the network partners got together and asked the league to consider Wednesday Morning Football, with kickoffs timed precisely at 7:03 a.m. Eastern, it would get serious consideration. It didn't help matters that two days later, after the networks had sent up their howls of protest regarding the plan, Tagliabue refused to back down from the notion that the league could get CBS and FOX to go along with flexible scheduling in 2002. In his best imperial tones, Tagliabue basically said we think we can talk the networks into it because that's what we think is best for everyone involved. Next question? Which leads you to believe that meetings between the league and the two aggrieved networks this week went something like this: NFL: We would like you to accept flexible scheduling in 2002. Networks: Uh, no. See you in 2006, and we'll talk about it when our contract is up. While the NFL's current TV contract expires after the 2005 season, the league has the right to reopen its contract with the networks and solicit other bids after the coming season. But with whom? With one recent Morgan Stanley analyst projecting that ABC/ESPN, CBS and FOX will lose a combined $2.9 billion on their eight-year $17.6 billion NFL contract, nobody is going to be standing in line waiting to lose gigantic sums of money in a soft advertising market. That's why the NFL doesn't hold the hammer on the flexible scheduling issue, and it knows it. With the networks already losing money on the NFL, and the threat of them asking for a partial rebate of their rights fees looming in the not-too-distant future, the league can't just impose its scheduling will this time.
Even though flexible scheduling just makes too much sense not to eventually adopt. The league should have a means to ensure that TV viewers see meaningful playoff-implication games on Monday nights in December. And it should have a safety value in place to avoid its current three-year streak of not having that season's eventual Super Bowl champion appear on its Monday-night showcase. Lost in all the furor about flexible scheduling is the possibility that is much ado about little. In the worst-case scenario, no more than four Monday-nighters each season would be affected. More likely, just a game or two would even warrant consideration to be moved by ABC. Like instant replay, the system would be designed to rectify only the most grievous of errors in terms of scheduling. We all know the real issue is one of finances and not fan consideration. With as much money as there is at stake in the league's TV contracts, the NFL almost always does what's best for the bottom line. In this case, the league argues that a rising tide will lift all boats -- meaning that healthy Monday-night ratings will end up benefiting NFL viewership across the board. Still, CBS and FOX remain skeptical that they're being asked in this case to take one for the team. Which prompted FOX Sports chairman David Hill to memorably issue the following quote in regards to flexible scheduling: "I will fight this with every fiber of my being." I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot of room for compromise and negotiation in that statement. The league says flexible scheduling already exists and that FOX and CBS both have benefited from it in recent years. In the season's second half, the NFL has moved marquee matchups from 1 p.m. to the more prized 4 p.m. national time slot on Sundays, and vice versa in the case of less attractive games. But that's really an apples and oranges comparison that Tagliabue knows better than to cite, given that those games remain on the same network and are played on the same day as originally scheduled. Giving away a glamour game to a rival network so it can be a prime-time ratings bonanza on a Monday night is another story. So for now, flexible scheduling remains a good idea whose time has yet to come. Expect the NFL to take another run at it in 2003, when maybe it will come up with inducements for CBS and FOX to swallow hard and make it work. More likely, it'll have to wait until 2006, when the league incorporates the idea into any new TV network contract. By then, we'll all be ready for some "flexible" Monday Night Football. Don Banks covers pro football for CNNSI.com.
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