Even though Roger Goodell has insisted on watering down the league’s overall product, Monday Night Football still carries a special cachet. It’s been a rough run for MNF this year, though, with some real stinkers for what’s supposed to be the NFL’s special weekly feature. In fact, according to ALDLAND’s proprietary MNF Index, this has been the worst slate of Monday-night games in NFL history.
Unlike Monday Night Football’s ascendant sibling, Sunday Night Football, or its soon-to-be-terminated cousin, SEC on CBS, all MNF matchups must be chosen well before the season starts. This means that the NFL and its media partners have to make significant, long-range predictions based on minimal data when they are setting all of the pairings for their premier weekly showcase. How well do they do this?
To answer this question, the MNF Index evaluates the quality of Monday Night Football games immediately prior to kickoff to present a quality score illustrating the schedule-makers’ degree of success at presenting enticing games likely to live up to the expectations of a nationally televised, Monday-night event. The MNF Index therefore does not consider any in-game performance data.
The results, shown below through the current week, unambiguously support a clear conclusion: Monday Night Football never has been less worthy of its billing than in 2022. While a look into the deep numbers also reveals that the decline began in 2021, MNF’s quality has fallen off a cliff this season.
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