Why Not Two Monday Night Football Games?

[E72521]

If you live in the East you stay up past midnight. Most of us watch only the first half. We have jobs.

If you live in the West you miss a good chunk of the first half commuting.

It seems to me that ABC is loosing substantial advertising revenue with this stupid time slot.

Central Time doesn't have it so bad, but at the expense of the Pacific and Eastern time zones.

Would it be cost effective for ABC and the NFL to run an eastern game at 7:00 p.m.ish Eastern and a western game at 7:00 p.m.ish Pacific? ESPN could cover the opposite coast's games even. I think ABC could recoup the cost of producing two games from the dramatic increase in the number of fans actually watching the entire game(s), just like CBS and FAUX. I don't see how this could hurt anyone financially. Sounds like a money maker and it's fan friendly.

Why not?

[Pythagras]

I dont think MNF gets good enough ratings to warrant it.

[White Lightning]

I fully support that.

[starfish]

Monday night is the nationally broadcast game. The rest are regional games.

Monday night itself is nothing special. The networks chose to have a national game. They picked Monday for it. It could have been Wednesday night football.

[TelcontarStorm]

Great idea!
Mostly because MNF is known to have very BAD games.
It is not fun watching a blow out. The kind of game that one team has a 21 pt. lead by halftime. These are the games not worth watching. It would be great to have a different game to switch to.

In case you're thinking Double Header,I'd be an east time zoner who stayed up to watch the late game!

[RTFirefly]

I like the idea, and it would probably work, revenue-wise, since the two games wouldn't be competing head-to-head.

7pm might be too early for a kickoff - 7:30 might work better. A lot of people work until 5:30 or 6pm, and 7pm doesn't leave much time for getting home and sitting down to even a brief dinner before kickoff. (There are still a few families in the USA who don't watch TV while they eat dinner.)

But I think the basic idea is sound. I'm just not going to stay up past 11pm watching a game between two teams I don't care about - I'd rather get some sleep. And knowing that, I rarely tune in for the first half anymore. If I knew I could hang in there for the end of the game if it got interesting, I might just watch the beginning.

[hijack]
Same thing goes for MLB's postseason games, FWIW. I'm told there was a great World Series this year.
[/hijack]

[lieu]

Personally, I'd also like to see:

Tuesday Night Football,
Wednesday Night Football,
Thursday Night Football, and
Friday Night Football.

The mere thought make me want to slap my granny.

[racer72]

A few years ago there were 2 games on Monday night, well one was Monday afternoon but it was still on Monday. I believe it was back in 1997 when the Kingdome in Seattle had a little problem with ceiling tiles coming loose and falling into the stands. The Seattle Seahawks and the Cleveland Browns were scheduled to open the season on the Sunday before Labor Day but the Seattle fire department would not give clearance for Kingdome to be occupied till some things were fixed. It took a day longer than expected so the game was moved from Sunday to Monday. The game started at 1 PM on the west coast and was over before the regularly scheduled Monday night game started.