Football drama plays out with affils
ABC 2 minds on Sunday
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But Rob Hubbard, president of the Hubbard TV Group, said he never would've taken a pass on the Vikings' victory over the New Orleans Saints if he didn't own another TV station in the market, UHF indie KSTC, which ran the NFL game simultaneously with ESPN. Even on the weaker station, the game racked up an 18.7 rating, beating the 16.6 rating that ESPN harvested in the Minneapolis area. The ESPN Sunday games during each NFL season stir up conflict between the broadcast nets and their affiliates, so much so that no network affiliate-relations executive would speak about the subject. Since NFL games on ESPN run during the opening months of the broadcast season, the broadcast networks hate primetime preemptions on Sunday, when just under 100 million people are typically watching TV, according to Nielsen.
When the Sunday schedule of NFL games on ESPN gets firmed up before the season starts, ESPN puts the games up for bids in each of the markets where the local team is playing.
The networks' owned TV stations tend not to go after the ESPN game, for obvious reasons. If its O&Os were preempting the Sunday entertainment schedule for an ESPN football game, a network would lose the moral force of demanding that a mere affiliate cease from doing a similar ESPN deal.
The CBS owned stations in San Francisco (KPIX) and Denver (KCNC), for example, have local deals with the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos to carry the teams' exhibition games in August and early September, when the net is usually saturating its schedule with reruns.
But neither station made a serious effort to get the rights locally to any ESPN cablecasts precisely because they didn't want to knock out original episodes of "Cold Case" and the CBS Sunday Movie.
ABC finds itself torn in two directions. So far this season, it's getting spectacular ratings on Sunday night, led by the runaway hit "Housewives." So the last thing it wants is for one of its major-market affiliates to dump the schedule, even for one Sunday night.
But ESPN is a sister company of ABC: If ESPN prospers with bigger Sunday ratings because the game is available on two outlets in a big market, parent Walt Disney Co. is not going to complain too loudly.
