Farewell to Monday Night Football
With tonight's final
Dallas Cowboys game (and a big congrats on a promising start to next year!), I realize I forgot to mention that, for the first time in about 10 years, I actually sat down and watched a full Monday Night football game: the last one on ABC. In reality, it's hardly the "last" anything: the game is moving to ESPN next season. In a world where 96% of the country views TV on satellite or cable, it's just a different channel.
However, it made me think: why had I not sat through a single, continuous MNF in 10 years for me? This used to be an EVENT: you'd plan your week around it. Heck, when I was managing retail, I made sure I was off or late on Tuesdays, just for that! It was somehow a shared importance: it transcended football, transcended sports: it was one of the few national requirements.
So, why had I not watched a full game in 10 years? Partly, it was the move to California: there is still something so strange about waking up late on a Sunday morning and turning on the TV...only to see football on. Heck, I remember visiting CA, and sitting in the St. Francis' bar at 10AM, dunking biscotti, watching football with a few diehard Eat Coasters, and wondering if this explained why Californians were so much more laid back. And MNF at 5:30 PM is a logistical impossibility: you get home or to a bar just in time for the closing minutes of the 2nd half. At that point, you are not tremendously invested, and you're subjected to endless promos for halftime...you're practically checked out.
But there's more to it. It's one of the strange effects of the multichannel, multimedia world we live in: MNF just doesn't matter anymore. Sure, you can argue the games were often blowouts, or the announcers were never the same after Cosell, but the reality is that the entertainment options exploded in the late '80's, and MNF was no longer a touchstone.
And finally, when the hell did MNF became a heartland, country-fied, Republican institution? I mean, with the exception of Dennis Miller (before he turned to the Dark Side), this has been a practical advertisement for the Republican party for the last decade. My muse,
Bill Simmons, said it best here:
"With the announcing team failing to set the world on fire, they started taking goofy chances with the halftime show, paving the way for Tim McGraw's "I like it, I love it" highlight song that had hundreds of thousands of country-music haters inadvertently humming the chorus on the way to work this winter, realizing what they were doing, then debating whether to veer into oncoming traffic."So, after watching the final game, with eerie parallels to the Jets losing by the same score as they lost the first MNF game, and my hopes of seeing Doug Flutie take the national stage one more time, I realized that, while I had not watched a full game in 10 years...I hadn't missed it. Sunday Night Football, which I used to think of as a joke, has become much more what I expected, much more of what I wanted, and I look forward to NBC's version, with their flexible scheduling, and Madden (who will hopefully remember he's supposed to actually show some animation) next season.
Farewell, ABC's MNF. It'll be nice to check in on you, every so often on ESPN, but I don't know that you'll be all that missed. As for this year, go Pats, and look for my 'Boys next season!
