F
ear not, Bears fans. If Monday night’s meeting with the Vikings goes south, there will be another NFL game to satisfy your football fix.
After the Bears-Vikings game starts at 7 p.m. on ABC, the Falcons and Raiders will kick off at 7:30 on ESPN. It’s the first time the Bears will be part of such side-by-side scheduling, now in its third year on the Disney-owned networks.
“When we got this included in our new rights deal, the best thing was it was an opportunity to have more football on Monday night,” said Tim Reed, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions.
The NFL and Disney agreed in 2021 to a rights deal granting ESPN and ABC the ability to air different games on the same Monday night. The first instance was in Week 2 of 2022, the bridge year between Disney’s previous deal and its current 10-year deal. The double broadcasts expanded to three weeks last year; the Bears are part of this season’s final installment.
The setup increases Disney’s annual NFL inventory, the most valuable product in broadcasting. It had been 17 games and is now 25, including an exclusive ESPN+ broadcast, two ESPN/ABC simulcasts in Week 18 and two playoff games.
The setup also increases ESPN’s reach by airing games on broadcast TV, a what’s-old-is-new-again trend in sports broadcasting.
“We’re fortunate to have ABC and ESPN to take advantage of programming two games at the same time,” said Reed, who leads ESPN’s daily activity with the NFL regarding business and programming. “I think about it more like a late-afternoon window on Sunday where one game is starting earlier than the other. So, from a fan perspective, you have this awesome opportunity to get updates on either one.”
That’s a key component of both broadcasts and a rarity for prime-time games, which largely are exclusive. Bears fans locked into their game will stay updated on the Falcons-Raiders game via a constant scorebug in the upper-left corner of the screen. ESPN even added a notification to alert viewers when either team is in the red zone.
ESPN has learned to be judicious with studio updates and live look-ins on either game, fully aware that viewers of one might have no interest in the other. The decision to show either is made from ESPN’s studio in Bristol, Connecticut. A producer there will communicate with the producers on-site to notify them whether an update is coming or a two-box will be used.
“We’ve become more strategic and situational about when we do live look-ins,” Reed said. “There’s a lot of factors at play. To our production team’s credit, there’s no exact script for those. It’s a little bit of a feel for what’s going on. If one game’s in a critical moment, you don’t necessarily want to go to a two-box.
“The one piece that works well is the in-progress highlights. That’s something as football fans we’ve seen forever on Sunday afternoons. To have Scott van Pelt cut into one game and offer a highlight, that’s a nice little added element.”
ESPN continues to experiment with kickoff times. The two Monday games have been separated by as many as 75 minutes and as few as zero. Those times are set when the full schedule is released in May and are chosen in collaboration with the NFL.
As for the announcers, Bears-Vikings gets ESPN’s regular “Monday Night Football” crew of Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Lisa Salters. Falcons-Raiders gets Chris Fowler, Louis Riddick, Dan Orlovsky and Laura Rutledge.
“Our biggest hope is that all of those Bears fans, when that game concludes, they’re going to quickly flip over to ESPN to watch the conclusion of the second game,” Reed said. “And to me, that’s what the beauty is of having two games on one night and offering the fans more football than they’re used to getting on a Monday night.”
Remote patrol
No NFL game will air in the Chicago market opposite the Lions-Bears game on Dec. 22, but don’t blame the Bears. The league allows broadcasters to air a game opposite an in-market home game four times per season, and that number was already reached. Bears fans may recall that number being zero, but the NFL has relaxed the restriction over the years, first to two times and now four. Such decisions are made between the NFL, the network and the local affiliate, those being CBS and CBS 2 Chicago in the Bears’ case.
• The NFL’s Week 17 schedule will take shape soon. That’s the week with five games still listed as TBD, three of which will air that Saturday on NFL Network. One could end up on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” which figures to flex out Dolphins-Browns. Also that week, there’s a chance Fox switches Packers-Vikings from noon to 3:25 in place of Cowboys-Eagles. That will be a fascinating week.
• This week is a double doubleheader week in the NFL. That means CBS and Fox will show two games each on Sunday. In the Chicago market, those games are Chiefs-Browns (Ian Eagle, Charles Davis) and Bills-Lions (Jim Nantz, Tony Romo) on CBS, and Cowboys-Panthers (Joe Davis, Greg Olsen) and Steelers-Eagles (Kevin Burkhardt, Tom Brady) on Fox.
