Tag Archives: television

Officially Confirmed: The 2022 Monday Night Football season was the worst ever

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Well, it is finally official: The 2022 Monday Night Football season was the worst season of Monday Night Football in the recorded history of Monday Night Football. We here at ALDLAND were on this early, and, in a report published on December 6, 2022, disclosed the preliminary and then-conclusive findings derived from our proprietary MNF Index: “This has been the worst slate of Monday-night games in NFL history….Monday Night Football never has been less worthy of its billing than in 2022.” Today, ALDLAND updates and confirms that conclusive conclusion conclusively for the now-completed 2022 NFL season.

As a reminder:

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.

Looking ahead from that early December vantage point, we wondered whether the three remaining Monday-night games– Rams at Packers, Chargers at Colts, and Bills at Bengals– might offer a meaningful chance at redemption. They did not. Indeed, Rams-Packers (Week 15) was, according to the ALDLAND MNF Index, the worst MNF game of the season. And although the no-doubt quality matchup between the Bills and Bengals (Week 17) would have been the best MNF game ever, the game (a) correctly was canceled due to Damar Hamlin’s frightening, serious injury and (b) would not remotely have altered the ultimate conclusion that there has been no worse season of Monday Night Football than the just-completed 2022 season of Monday Night Football had it been played.

Some good news: Not only does ALDLAND’s MNF Index generate results, but it also gets results. Beginning in the 2023 NFL season, Monday Night Football will be subject to flex scheduling. This option should allow ESPN to buoy the quality of its flagging showcase and, if executed effectively on an ongoing basis, could cement the 2022 MNF season as the worst-ever MNF season ever.

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Is this the worst-ever season for Monday Night Football? Our MNF Index says yes

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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.

Continue reading →

MLB.TV.PSA

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Readers of this website know that this author is among the last people on Earth who would go out of his way to promote an MLBAM business decision, but here you are, reading a post by me notifying you that MLB.tv is on sale today for a loosely speaking fair-ish price.

Of course, this occasion mostly serves as a reminder of MLB’s callous media-distribution practices. Six years ago, the league settled an antitrust lawsuit attacking things like its telecast blackout policy and centralized MLB.tv product by agreeing to make pricing and offering concessions to fans. Specifically, the seasonal price of the full MLB.tv package at that time would drop from $129.99 to $109.99, and the league would create a new, single-team package at a seasonal price of $84.99. These prices were to remain fixed for five years (i.e., through the 2020 season), subject to annual increases only up to the higher of three percent or the rate of inflation.

Now, that settlement agreement has expired, and MLB is seizing the opportunity to undo its effects. Most obviously, across-the-board pricing is up, doubly insulting as the league simultaneously excludes games from the full MLB.tv package for the benefit of its new partnerships with NBC and Apple.

Perhaps even more underhanded, however, is the soft killing of the single-team MLB.tv package. When first offered, the single-team option was priced at seventy-seven-percent of the full package price, then a twenty-five-dollar difference. MLB now has aggressively closed that gap. At today’s sale pricing, for example, the cost of the single-team option has jumped to eighty-six-percent of the full package price, just a ten-dollar difference. Stated otherwise, someone considering a single-team package can receive a thirty-fold increase in programming for just ten additional dollars. “Even you dummies know that’s a good deal,” fans hear Rob Manfred saying in their heads, even as they wonder why it doesn’t quite feel like a deal. The move to neutralize the single-team package feels like a purely spiteful move designed to achieve the functional undoing of one of the settlement agreement’s most visible achievements without any meaningful cost savings to MLB.

As I have been writing here for years, the message should be a simple one: “Rather than changing the game he wants people to watch . . . Manfred ought to change the way people can watch the game, obviously by making it easier for them to do so.” For how much longer can Manfred continue to squeeze baseball’s fans– including, as a recent example, Padres fans required to purchase yet another streaming service to watch this morning’s Peacock-exclusive game against the Atlanta Braves beginning at 8:35 am San Diego time– remains to be seen.

InDirecTV: A battle over television access to NFL games continues

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Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court sat with a full bench for the first time since the passing of the long-tenured Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Among other actions on Monday, the Court (Justice Amy Coney Barrett not participating) released an order in the antitrust lawsuit challenging NFL teams’ collective arrangement with DirecTV in which the former permit the latter to be the sole provider of live, out-of-market game telecasts through the NFL Sunday Ticket package.

On its face, the order is good news for those challenging that arrangement, because it allows their lawsuit to continue, letting stand a lower-court order that reversed an even-lower-court order that would have dismissed the challengers’ case.

But while the media coverage of yesterday’s order also noted the portion of the statement included with the order from Justice Brett Kavanaugh that the Supreme Court’s decision “should not necessarily be viewed as agreement with” the lower court’s decision to revive the case, I have not seen any further discussion of the entirety of Justice Kavanaugh’s statement, which goes much farther than what that out-of-context quotation might suggest.

More than a neutral, “we’re not saying one way or the other” comment, Justice Kavanaugh’s statement pours cold water on the hopes of those who saw this lawsuit as a vehicle to break up the NFL’s antiquated, frustrating, and expensive approach to delivering television access to its product. Most fundamentally, the statement suggests the possibility that the challengers may not have a right to bring their lawsuit at all: “This Court’s case law authorizes suits by direct purchasers but bars suits by indirect purchasers. The plaintiffs here did not purchase a product from the NFL or any team, and may therefore be barred from bringing suit against the NFL and its teams.” (Citations and internal quotation marks omitted.) And even if the challengers do have a right to sue, their claims may fail in substance if the NFL and its member teams are organized and operate as a cohesive legal unit:

Under the existing contract, the 32 NFL teams have authorized the NFL to sell the television rights for out-of-market games to a single buyer, DirecTV. The plaintiffs argue, and the Court of Appeals agreed, that antitrust law may require each team to negotiate an individualized contract for televising only its own games. But that conclusion appears to be in substantial tension with antitrust principles and precedents. The NFL and its member teams operate as a joint venture. And antitrust law likely does not require that the NFL and its member teams compete against each other with respect to television rights.

(Citations omitted.)

To be sure, these are the preliminary views of one justice on a nine-member court that might never see this case again. If the case does return to the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh’s expressed concerns might not be relevant to the questions at issue for the Court at that time, or, if they are, they might not be shared by a sufficient number of his fellow justices to be consequential.

As the case heads back to the trial court, however, Justice Kavanaugh’s comments could prove influential and find their way into the analysis of a judge who already has shown some disinclination toward the challengers’ claims and, more certainly, the arguments of the league and teams.

DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket package may survive this legal challenge, but the service separately is facing financial difficulties that could render the lawsuit practically moot. Five years after buying it for $49 billion, AT&T has been trying, unsuccessfully, to sell DirecTV as it hemorrhages subscribers, the rate of losses recently slowing only because it’s running out of subscribers to lose. With the NFL’s agreement with DirecTV set to expire in the next year or two, attrition rather than litigation might be the most fruitful course for those seeking more football-viewing options on Sunday afternoons. Stay tuned.

The week in “sports”: 4/17/20

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From the Got To Admit It’s Getting Better Department:

  • Baseball is back: Not everything is getting better, of course, and circumstances are continuing to worsen for many people in many places. For sports fans this week, though, a bright spot was the return of professional, regular-season baseball. The Chinese Professional Baseball League opened Wednesday with the Rakuten Monkeys hosting the Unilions (more formally, it seems, the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions) in Taiwan. The game went into extra innings and ended with a walk-off solo homer (sound on) in the bottom of the twelfth to claim the Monkeys’ first win under their current ownership. The game was played without fans in attendance, though you may recall the Monkeys as the team that promised to fill its stands during this period with robot supporters (one of whom I think can be seen in the game-winning clip linked above). All that considered, the game atmosphere didn’t feel too sterile, though, thanks to the home team’s decision to pump in plenty of crowd noise, including chants and songs. There also were a half-dozen Monkeys cheerleaders– surely real humans and not Westworld hosts, even if we recently learned (minor spoiler alert) that the Delos park property likely is located on an island in the South China Sea– on hand to celebrate their team’s on-field achievements. It remains to be seen whether the CBPL season will continue as planned (the Monkeys beat the Lions again on Thursday, 15-3 in regulation) and eventually phase fans back into the seats, and it of course is unknown how they will respond if a player tests positive for COVID-19. For now, though, we can enjoy this moment of quasi-normalcy and hope that it proves to be a model adaptable to sports in North America in the near future.
  • iNoLongerRacing: After shouting a racial slur at one of his teammates during a live stream of a virtual race, NASCAR driver Kyle Larson quickly lost most of his sponsors, and then his team dumped him.
  • Golf’s precolonial study: We’re not talking literary criticism, although I tend to be critical of placing any weight on announcements that postponed events will occur at a future date given how little we understand about this disease and instead prefer to wait until the events, like the above-referenced CPBL opening day, actually happen. Even so, I am linking to this story about the PGA’s current plan to resume its season– sans fans– at Colonial Country Club on June 8 for three reasons: 1) of all sports, golf seems the easiest to play while abiding social-distancing requirements; 2) I needed another bullet point for this post; and 3) we’re still pretty desperate for good news in the sports world.
  • Eat your betting ticket: Major League Eating (a thing!) is taking wagers on a special eating contest featuring Joey Chestnut and seven other top competitive eaters to raise money for charity, and that’s all I feel like writing about that.
  • Coming up/Odd Odds: Speaking of large men and gambling, I’d wager it’s more likely than not that Marshawn Lynch is back on Westworld this Sunday, though I’ll leave it to the professional bookmakers to set the line on the number of different emotions that will be illuminated on his sweatshirt during the episode.

cpbl fans

The week in “sports”: 4/10/20

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tillman winston

From the Hey, We’re Trying Department:

  • Sports were cancelled again: Amidst alternatively gloomy and pie-in-the-sky loony outlooks shared on the prospect of the near-term return of anything not horse racing and NASCAR videogaming, the best hope– really– this week was UFC don Dana White’s proposal to stage MMA fights on a mysterious private island. Promptly after that story broke, the UFC announced the cancellation of its next round of scheduled fights. It also turns out White & Co. don’t actually own that island just yet. Meanwhile, plenty of viral bluster from a couple of college football’s biggest mouths, Mike “I’m a Man” Gundy and Dabo “Dabo” Swinney; NASCAR’s iRacing coverage insists on consistently using a very annoying term with regard to Bubba Wallace (not going to link that one); and MLB’s floated plan to play its 2020 season in the summer in the desert with lots of players and staff but no fans and no player or staff family members hits some too-obvious roadblocks. Also, Al Kaline died. More on him in a forthcoming post, but if you feel like just packing it in and trying again for sports in 2021, I won’t blame you.
  • A college basketball champion was crowned: The 2020 NCAA men’s basketball national championship game would have been Monday night, and the young cyborgs at FiveThirtyEight determined that, had it been played, it would have featured Michigan State and Kansas, with the Spartans prevailing to claim their third national championship in program history. (I couldn’t bear to read that article, so I’m sorry if it’s the wrong link.) In case you have the desire to empty an entire bag of Morton System Saver salt into your March Madness wound, here’s the site’s full projected 2020 bracket.
  • Other news: Chris Johnson maybe had two guys killed? And the Masters twitter account is posting pretty pictures and video highlights in memory of what would have been Masters week 2020.
  • Coming up: Previews indicate that Marshawn Lynch will return in Sunday night’s episode of Westworld.

Surprise: One Fox News segment reminds me of another Fox News segment

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We don’t really do politics around here, and mention of any of the major cable news channels tends to operate as mere verbal code for divisive political partisanship. Some of you reading this probably hate Fox News. I propose that even those of you who fall into that group would have to admit that there are producers working at that channel who have a sense of humor. Or maybe it’s just me, the person who always thought The Colbert Report wasn’t as funny as its parodied target, The O’Reilly Factor.

If you’re still with me, enjoy this segment from last night’s The Ingraham Angle, “Millennial Vaper Faces Off With Doctor“:

The segment instantly reminded me of one that aired on Fox News Live twelve years ago:

Laura Ingraham closed out last night’s vaping debate by saying, “We’re going to check in with Tommy Smokes in about six years and see how he’s doing.” If you have the same questions about Lydia and Craig from the streaking segment, which aired in 2006, I’m happy to report that one’s a published author and the other is a surgeon.

Addressing the sports consequences of the Disney-Fox deal

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As highlighted in this week’s Sports Law Roundup, Disney and Fox are entering into a doozy of a media deal that involves everything from movies to television shows to streaming platforms to sports programming. This transaction has Star Wars components, Hulu components, and Simpsons components that, rightfully, are making headlines. It would not be surprising, however, if some of the most visible changes for viewers that result from this asset purchase, for which approval by various supervisory entities remains pending, come for consumers of sports media.

In an article out today, Will Leitch sheds some light on how this sale may affect the sports-media landscape:   Continue reading →

Sports Law Roundup – 12/15/2017

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aslr

Here are the top sports-related legal stories from the past week:

  • Louisville basketball: The fallout from the FBI’s announced investigation of Adidas-sponsored men’s college basketball programs resulted in the termination of Rick Pitino’s  position as the head coach of Louisville’s team. That, in turn, spawned Pitino lawsuits against Louisville for wrongful termination and Adidas for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Louisville now has sued Pitino for breach of contract and negligence and seeks monetary from Pitino arising out of the school’s losses due to vacated wins, potentially including its 2013 national title, and other NCAA sanctions, lost donations, and other financial losses. Louisville’s complaint alleges Pitino admitted liability when he said in a post-termination interview that he knew about NCAA violations but did not report them and took “full responsibility” for his decisions to hire assistants who subsequently engaged in wrongful activity.
  • Television transfer: An announced transaction between 20th Century Fox and Disney involving the latter’s acquisition of more than $50 billion (exclusive of debt) of the former’s assets has potentially significant consequences for the entities’ sports properties. Included among the assets Disney (which already owns ESPN and ABC) is acquiring are all of the Fox Sports Regional Networks (e.g., Fox Sports Detroit, Fox Sports South, etc.) and the YES Network. Disney also is acquiring other substantial assets, including FX Network, Fox’s interest in Hulu, and all of Fox’s film and television studios, which would include the rights to film properties like “The Simpsons,” “Modern Family,” “Avatar” (for which one source reports there are four sequels in the works), “Deadpool,” and “X-Men.” In exchange, Fox shareholders will receive shares of Disney stock. In addition, a spinoff entity will take control of Fox’s primary national networks, including FOX, Fox News, Fox Business, FS1, FS2, and the Big Ten Network. The deal still requires approval from both existing entities’ boards of directors and shareholders, as well as government regulators.
  • Baylor sexual assaults: The flow of evidence of Baylor‘s apparently widespread sexual assault problems seems unlikely to abate anytime soon now that a judge is permitting discovery of sexual assault reports from students who are not parties to pending litigation involving the school, as well as records of third-party Code of Conduct violations limited to violations related to “sex” and is ordering Baylor to produce documents previously provided to independent auditors, those being “32,000 nonparty student records, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents, without regard to” relevance or federal privacy restrictions.
  • Gambler defamation: In June, an alleged “gambling guru” known as RJ Bell (real name: Randall James Busack) sued Deadspin (and its post-Gawker-bankruptcy owner, Gizmodo Media Group, LLC) and freelance writer Ryan Goldberg over an article Goldberg wrote and Deadspin published that was critical of Busack and which Busack alleges was libelous. On Tuesday, a New York bankruptcy judge announced that trial in the case will begin on Valentine’s Day 2018. An important legal question in the case is whether a provision in an order of the bankruptcy court overseeing the Gawker Media bankruptcy intended to operate as a release of third-party claims against Gawker Media writers applies to bar Busack’s claims against Goldberg, which is the position Goldberg takes. Busack contends that the release doesn’t apply to him because he didn’t sue Gawker during the bankruptcy and received no distribution from the Gawker bankruptcy estate. Gawker Media entered bankruptcy as a result of a prior lawsuit Hulk Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) brought. The attorney who represented Bollea in that case also represents Busack in this case. On Wednesday, the judge, who previously indicated he found the release issue ambiguous, ruled that the release did, in fact, bar most of Busack’s claims.
  • Garbler defamation: Lou Holtz, former head football coach at Notre Dame and South Carolina and former football “analyst” for ESPN, has sued The Daily Beast and one of its writers, Betsy Woodruff, for defamation. Holtz claims that Woodruff’s article about Holtz’s comments during the 2016 Republican National Convention, in which she reported he said immigrants were “deadbeats” and “invading the U.S.,” contained information known to be false and caused Holtz to lose future speaking opportunities.
  • NFL Network sexual harassment: A former NFL Network employee has sued NFL Enterprises, LP (apparently the Los-Angeles-based television and broadcast arm of the NFL), Jessica Lee (allegedly a supervisor at NFL Network whose LinkedIn page describes her as the Network’s director of studio operations), and fifty unnamed defendants. The plaintiff’s lawsuit nominally is one for wrongful termination, but its most newsworthy allegations involve claims of sexual harassment, assault, and battery by other NFL Network employees, including former players Marshall Faulk, Donovan McNabb, Warren Sapp, Ike Taylor, Heath Evans, and Eric Davis and former executive Eric Weinberger, who now works as the president of Bill Simmons Media Group, which owns The Ringer.

Sports court is in recess.

DirecTV will refund NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers who cancel due to player protests and possibly for other protest and protest-protest-related reasons

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This afternoon, the WSJ reported on a new policy under which AT&T’s DirecTV, the exclusive provider of the NFL Sunday Ticket package that allows viewers to watch out-of-market NFL games otherwise unavailable due to the league’s regressive approach to broadcast rights, will grant user refunds:

DirecTV is allowing at least some customers to cancel subscriptions to its Sunday Ticket package of NFL games and obtain refunds, if they cite players’ national anthem protests as the reason for discontinuing service, customer service representatives said Tuesday.

Under Sunday Ticket’s regular policy, refunds are not to be given once the season is underway. But the representatives said they are making exceptions this season—which began in September—because of the controversy over the protests, in which players kneel or link arms during the national anthem.
…
Mark Hoffman, a longtime subscriber to Sunday Ticket, which gives sports fans the ability to watch every Sunday game, said in an interview he was able to cancel his subscription on Monday. The package costs around $280 per-season.

“I honestly didn’t think I’d get a refund,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I know their guidelines, I just wanted to make a point.” Mr. Hoffman, a former business editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said he made his case successfully to a customer service representative after sitting through a recording saying cancellations weren’t an option.

Intrigued, I wondered whether DirecTV would offer refunds to subscribers who want to cancel because of the historic rise in penalty calls that is making this season’s games nearly unwatchable. And what about those who now want to cancel in protest over DirecTV’s policy of providing refunds to subscribers who cancelled to protest the players’ protest? According to DirecTV, all of those options may be on the table:

directv nfl sunday ticket protest

I generally support any policy under which users can receive refunds for sports-broadcast services they’ve already purchased, and the more absurd and tangential the reason for the refund request, the better.