In the television world, whatever the NFL touches turns to gold. It’s why the league and its network have made prime-time events out of the draft, the opening of free agency and the release of a schedule that is already basically in place months prior.
And now, with the Super Bowl taking place on the west coast for the first time since 2003, the league has found a creative way to manufacture yet another prime-time television event.
Media Day — which has traditionally taken place on the Tuesday morning of Super Bowl week, has been moved back to Monday night at 5 p.m. local time, which is 8 p.m. ET. That’ll make it easy for the league and NFL Network to highlight the silliness for a much larger audience.
But it’s possible this’ll be a one-time experiment, firstly because the league is able to take advantage of that three-hour time difference in order to avoid completely screwing up media working on deadlines. The next two Super Bowls take place in the Central time zone, making it almost impossible to pull a prime-time Media Day off from a logistics standpoint.
But also, was Media Day made for prime time? Take it from somebody who has participated in five of them — they’re overrated. Media Day was tailor-made to be taped during business hours and packaged for prime time. While NFL Network has been airing Media Day live for years — even selling tickets to the last few editions — the fact that it has taken place in the morning means few of us have seen the scantily-clad female reporters and the attention-seeking hijinx-hounds live.
Instead, we’ve seen the clips procured from producers, editors and reporters in neat little packages later on in the day. The league knows that most of those folks will tune in for the full version on Feb. 1, but it’s possible a lot of those viewers will realize that Media Day is actually about three hours of nothing with the odd moment of levity and/or complete stupidity.
The reality is NFLN’s ratings will be sky-high throughout the week regardless. This might help this year in particular, but watch for the regular schedule to return in 2017. And don’t expect many football fans to care. I’m betting they’ll be just as likely to tune in for Jamie Dukes and Dan Hellie with intermittent clips from the silly day that was.
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