I noticed that my local FOX station is carrying both MLB World Series (WS) and NFL Thursday Night Football. Today, Thursday, happens to be a travel day during the WS so no baseball game was scheduled for Thursday. What would have happened if one of the WS games in Boston had been rained out. What would FOX be carrying tonight? Did Fox have some deal to postpone a WS game past tonight. Would they have played the WS game during the day?
Let’s move this over to The Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’d guess it would have been a day game for TV and also to get it over with so the teams could get to LA for the Friday game. They wouldn’t move the latter unless they had to.
My guess is they’d just move the WS game to FS1.
Second choice would be to tack it on to the back end of the schedule to make it “Game 7 (if needed)”
My guess is they’d move game 2 to Friday night and reschedule; they can’t reschedule the football game, but postseason baseball games are often rescheduled. It would make for an awkward series, with a split in the first two games and then a travel day, but I’m sure MLB has those contingencies planned.
My guess is that MLB and the NFL coordinate things so such conflicts don’t happen. Even if there are two different networks involved, I’ll bet that there’s enough overlap in the fan base that they don’t want to split the ratings.
All the major networks have multiple channels they can broadcast on. TNF is already on two channels (Fox and ESPN) and Fox has others like FS1 they can use. The World Series hasn’t had a weekday day game since 1972 (I think I heard that on the radio today) so they would never move an east coast game to 4:00 PM. That would be 1:00 PM on the West Coast.
They wouldn’t reschedule either game - too much is in place for them to move them that quickly.
If the WS goes to game 5 there will be a conflict with Sunday Night Football, neither game will move.
Though, as SNF is on NBC, it’s not a conflict which’d require a game to get moved to a secondary channel.
True, but people were commenting that leagues don’t want to compete with each other for viewers. That was to point out that no one is planning to move games to avoid that conflict.
Probably some sort of confirmation bias, but I always thought the NFL scheduled two low profile teams against what would be a potential Game 5 of the World Series.
Saints vs Vikings kind of qualify.
Thursday night football is carried by the NFL channel. However, in the contract, it states that the local markets of the two teams involved in any Thursday night game can also televise the game on a local channel. So, the Thursday night game is going to be televised on the NFL channel no matter what the baseball people decide to do.
Having said that, I should also add that no one wants to negatively impact anyone’s profits unnecessarily, so they would most likely be televised at different times. It would make sense that any make-up game on a travel day would be, say, a 3:00 pm game so that the teams could finish, travel, and get to sleep in time to be rested for Friday night’s game.
That was formerly the case, but in recent years, the NFL has been simulcasting most of the Thursday games on other networks. This year, 11 of the 13 TNF games are running on Fox as well as on NFL Network.
https://nflcommunications.com/Pages/2018-'Thursday-Night-Football'-Schedule-Released.aspx
My guess is national broadcast Fox coverage of the WS except for the Miami and Houston markets, which would have had TNF instead and WS coverage shunted to FS1 or other regional sports network. Anyone interested in TNF otherwise would need NFL Network.
I’m just guessing here.
Nope - Friday has a game scheduled in LA. They’re never going to reschedule a game the same day as another game played in a different city (on the other coast).
Something similar happened in 1972, when Game 3 was rained out, and they had to play Game 5 on the second travel day. Almost certainly, Game 2 would have been played Thursday afternoon; there just isn’t time to play a night game in Boston, and then fly to LA and get ready for a night game 24 hours later.
If it came down to playing the football and baseball games at the same time, I think Fox’s contracts would have required it to show the baseball game. I remember something similar happening with NBC back in the 1980s, when it had to interrupt its NFL coverage so it could air its national news and then a World Series game. As for showing the other game on a “secondary channel,” I don’t think that’s really an option, since DirecTV and U-Verse make it a point not to carry “secondary channels” that are not affiliates of the four major networks (and because of this, some people do not get any CW channels).