Score another one for the worldwide leaders.
ESPN announced Tuesday that it will televise an NFL Wild Card game this January, marking the first professional football playoff game in the company’s 35-year history.
ESPN has been the home of Monday Night Football since 2006 and signed an eight-year extension to its broadcast rights in 2011. The deal, which took effect earlier this spring, gave the league an option to air one Wild Card game on ESPN, which the NFL exercised for the coming season.
The deal looks like a win for those involved.
The NFL continues to grow its brand while raking in money off its broadcast rights, while ESPN lands one of the highest-rated television events of the year — a massive boost for a cable outlet.
It’s obviously not the Super Bowl, and ESPN still carries far fewer games than the three network
television partners. Despite the disparity, the cost of each network package is dwarfed by the massive annual amount of money ESPN shells out for broadcast rights.
The deal was expensive, but the NFL has given ESPN an opportunity to continue inching closer to its competitors on the network level.
By raising itself toward being on par with the major networks, ESPN can pass off its exorbitant broadcast costs on to cable and satellite providers, as ESPN already carries a per-subscriber price tag that’s estimated at nearly five times higher than any other cable channel.
As the cost continues to rise, cable and satellite providers could elevate ESPN to a higher broadcast tier to offset the massive costs. If that happens, ESPN would find itself on a level playing field with the networks and could pick up the rights to more big-ticket events.
Aside from seeing fractionally increased cable bills, ESPN getting a playoff game is good for the general public.
It saves the millions who tune in from having one of the big networks’ C-team announcers calling the game, and instead allows America to enjoy spending three-plus hours with
ESPN’s Monday Night crew — Mike Tirico and Jon Gruden.
Tirico is a solid play-by-play guy in the business, and the things that come out of Gruden’s mouth are downright entertaining. He can ramble a bit, but he knows the game and is basically a caricature of the best attributes from every football coach any of us have ever played for.
So the move is a home run from all aspects. Well, everything except journalism.
From hiring the very same athletes it’s supposed to be covering to questionable programming decisions like the non-stop coverage of backup quarterback Tim Tebow, ESPN has always walked a fine line between journalism and entertainment.
In the past couple years, ESPN has taken steps toward reinvigorating its credentials as an outlet for hard-hitting journalism, but journalistic ethics aren’t even the same species of cash cow as broadcasting the NFL.
It’s fair to wonder how much ESPN would be willing to let journalistic ethics endanger its multi-billion dollar relationship. There’s already been warning signs.
Last year, ESPN pulled out of its co-production role in “League of Denial,” a Frontline documentary investigating the NFL’s handling and response to head injuries within the game. The joint-project was based on a book written by ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru.
Neither the league nor the network would publicly admit the NFL applied pressure to kill the project, but widespread reports indicate ESPN pulled out of the documentary soon after NFL executives strongly voiced displeasure about the project at a meeting in New York.
At that point ESPN only carried one game per week and zero postseason games. As those numbers increase and the two giants become tied even closer together business-wise, it’s hard to imagine ESPN will allow its reporters to bite the hand that feeds them by airing the league’s dirty laundry.
Basically, don’t expect to see “30 for 30: NFL Stories” coming down the pipeline anytime soon.
James Moran is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Beacon, N.Y.