It’s the end of a crazy year in Sports and ESPN was/is obviously the leader in the AA clubhouse for number of mentions over the 365 days. I’ve been through the reasoning before so we won’t go back into that, but I did want to bring a few things to light.
The two things I harped on more than any other this year, the Who’s Now segment and Monday Night Football, were not only the most annoying things the network put out in the world, but also very very popular.
Monday Night Football is still a joke if you ask me. While it was better than last year it’s still a collection of randomness highlighted by a few insights from Ron Jaworski. I’m sure 95% of America wouldn’t even think about complaining if Tony Kornheiser was send out to pasture, but I don’t see that happening. So the question is if everyone can’t stand the program why was it the most watched series on Cable this season?
ESPN’s second season of Monday Night Football was the most-watched series on cable television in 2007, set an all-time viewership record and drew the four biggest cable household audiences and 16 of the top 20 this year. In two seasons on ESPN, Monday Night Football has registered nine of the top 10 all-time biggest household audiences in cable history, led by the Patriots-Ravens telecast earliest this month, which attracted cable’s largest household audience ever.
In a year that most of the games on MNF were not interesting matchups at all it’s an amazing feat that they pulled of such high numbers. While those numbers were huge for the network they didn’t shock me as much as this…
Who’s Now was far and away the top search of 2007 (receiving more than six times as many searches as the second-place top search). As noted in ESPN Ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber’s column, there were nearly 5 million votes cast throughout the tournament and more than 370,000 were cast for the final vote between Tiger Woods and LeBron James (Eldrick won with 65% of the votes if you were wondering … and I know you were).
The most annoying, pointless, irrelevant, and stupid programs ever put on television was the most searched topic on ESPN.com? You have to be kidding me.
There’s more to come on this during the AA Year in Review next week, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this.
‘Who’s Now’ a Huge Success for ESPN.com (Fanhouse)
(Other source: ESPN PR)
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