NFL: Why Sunday Night Football Flex Scheduling Should Start Before Week 10

After Sunday night’s massacre of the Colts by the New Orleans’ Saints, I’m sure that all of NFL fandom is united behind the proposition that SNF Flex Scheduling needs to start in Week 2, if not sooner.

Setting aside the matter of Sean Payton’s potential lack of sportsmanship (which I am being charitable about and attributing to pain killers)—that game was beyond bad. It was positively painful to watch. In fact, my household switched over to the World Series in the third quarter, as did many of you out there in TV land.

Why on earth would the NFL and NBC not choose to maximize the viewer interest in these Sunday night contests? Surely even a network programming moron would have known in August that this game was not worth watching?

In fact, viewership for the entire league has taken a dip since Peyton Manning’s injury. (Wow, maybe NBC should be picking up some of his contract!)

When famed swashbuckler Cyrano de Bergerac was being unimaginatively taunted about his protruding nose, the moronic tormentor defied Cyrano to devise a dozen more interesting jeers.

In Steve Martins’ fantastic modernization (Roxanne—and I highly recommend renting it), Martins’ character paraphrases:  “Something better? Yeah, I think I can come up with 12 something’s better.” He then launches into a monologue that is a modern cinematic masterpiece: “The Lord loves the birdies so much that he gives them your nose to sit upon,etc.”

Hang in there; I have a point.

What “something’s better” could the NFL and NBC have offered us for the fourth Sunday night in October? 

1)  How about the Chargers and the Jets? That way you get both coasts watching, with
the reasonable expectation of a good game that would have kept us tuned in through the final whistle.

2)  Falcons/Lions. Not everyone would have predicted the Lions’ success back when the schedule was made, but their improvement was clearly obvious by August. Not to mention the titillating fisticuffs angle.

And let’s look back at the other Sunday night games of 2011:

1)  Week 6: Vikings/Bears? This had the cringe factor from the start with McNabb's embarrassment and Cutler's pancaking. Only wrestling fans would like that kind of potential for disaster.

2)  Week 3: Pittsburgh/Indy? Rewind in your head all of the reasons that you turned to the World Series this past Sunday. The schedulers should obviously have moved New England/Buffalo or Giants/Eagles into this slot.

So, here we are, feeling righteously indignant and all fired up about how wrong the NFL was in not re-scheduling our Sunday night viewing post-Labor Day. I’m with you. Why do you think I jumped on the assignment to write this article? Clearly, this is a bad system.

Now, let’s take a moment for a reality check. We live in America after all. And why does anything get done in America? To make money. The SNF franchise was formed to create a Sunday prime time ratings blockbuster. Period. We all know this.

NBC and the NFL make money when Americans tune in. Ratings are king. Kind of like cyber metrics for TV. All right, let’s examine those numbers. And for the sake of this argument, let’s just look at this past weekend’s extremely bad football game.

In a game where the winning margin was 55 points, NBC’s Sunday night gridiron offering was the No. 1 prime time show of the week. This was accomplished even with a game viewed by a season-low 12.5 million people. And even though many of us fled to the World Series for our sports’ fix, football still beat MLB's Game 4 when you consider the entire time span.

Indy/N'awleans was the poorest football contest of the season! The pre-game got a Nielsen rating of 6, was at 8 for kickoff and rose to 9 until half-time. (Anything above a 7 is respectable.) Even in the second half of a blowout of historic proportions, football was in third place!

And, let's face it, NBC isn’t having a good year. In fact, NBC has never recovered from the cancellation of Friends. Honestly. I looked it up. They are trailing in the 18-49 demographic with every show except (you guessed it) Sunday Night Football.

The bottom line here, sports fans, is that evidently we will watch anything related to football. The highest rated show of the day was FOX’s OT, which received a rating of 8.7 and a 28 percent market share. That’s more than a quarter of the audience! And it’s not even a game—it’s a post-game semi-serious review with Jimmy, Howie and Terry!

New Yorkers watched the Giants and the Arizona Cardinals more than an ALCS featuring the Yankees. Wisconsinites watched the Pack rather than the Brewers.

At the end of Week 5 of the 2011 season, NFL games were nine of the 10 most watched sporting events of the year. See? Put in a pigskin and we will watch it.

So why should NBC and the NFL institute flex scheduling in September? I don’t know how much it costs to turn around an entire sports broadcast crew in mid-country and re-route them to Green Bay. I’m willing to bet it’s a lot.

But, and it’s a big but, good games do even better. For the weekend of Oct. 2-3, two games topped all television viewership for the week. Almost 25 million Americans watched the Jets versus Patriots and the Packers versus Falcons. That’s for each game.

So, even with the NFL pulling in huge numbers of Americans with disposable income (or what’s left of it these days), the good games get almost twice as many viewers as the bad games. Sure, we hard core types will watch Seattle/Cleveland. But fully one-fourth of the TVs on the block will tune in for a real showdown.

Alright everybody, who do we tell? We don’t really have football congressmen (although it’s not a bad idea—but that’s another column.) And, based on all evidence thus far this century, those in the league’s New York office don’t care what we think anyway.

No, we have to write to NBC. They actually read audience letters. Audience letters got "The Playboy Club" cancelled in one week. (Good job there, by the way, folks.) Audience letters scare the you-know-what out of NBC executives. Trust me, I've worked with them.

It’s not hard, either. You don’t even have the leave the computer.

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Ready. Set. Change the Schedule.