It’s really rather remarkable that the NFL is the one institution that is observably capable of self-correction:
It’s human nature to resist admitting mistakes. The bigger, richer, and more powerful a company is, the less likely it will be to acknowledge an error. That makes the NFL’s willingness to scrap the Monday Night Football doubleheaders even more significant.
Appearing recently on The Schrager Hour podcast, NFL V.P. of broadcast planning Mike North was surprisingly candid about the league’s decision to declare defeat and retreat.
“Yes, the Monday night doubleheaders are a thing of the past,” North said, via Sam Neumann of Awful Announcing. “I don’t know why that didn’t work. Quite honestly, I thought it was fine. I thought it was good for us. That Monday night game, if it wasn’t your game on Monday, it would’ve been Sunday at [1:00 p.m. ET], among eight, nine, or 10 other games. You probably weren’t going to watch it anyway. Having it on Monday, a national broadcast . . . it just didn’t work. The fans didn’t appreciate it, and it probably wasn’t a good use of an NFL asset.”
I hated it. To be honest, I don’t even like the Thursday night games. But MNF was always special growing up; I was allowed to stay up and watch until the halftime highlights were over, and then my mother would write the final score on a piece of paper and tape it to my door so it would be the first thing I’d see in the morning. There was something about the music, and Howard Cosell, and the halftime highlights that just infused the game with more importance than usual.
That carried on into adulthood; a Monday Night Football game between the Vikings and Packers was an all-day event in the Twin Cities and there would invariably be a party at someone’s house with an 80-20 mix of Vikings and Packers fans.
So I hated, hated, hated the idea of a Monday night doubleheader. It felt like holding two Super Bowls on the same day. The college football administrators would do well to learn from the NFL’s self-correction, because they’re going to need it with their excessive expansions of a) March Madness and b) the College Football Playoff.
64 is the correct number for (a) and 8 is the correct number for (b).