Al Michaels as Amazon Thursday NFL debuts: ‘We are the pioneers.’ And Dolphins media news
A six-pack of football media notes on a Tuesday:
▪ Those of you who don’t know Amazon Prime from an Amazon rain forest will have a helpless feeling sometime Thursday when you go searching for the Chargers-Chiefs games and cannot find it.
Amazon makes its debut as the regular-season Thursday night NFL rights-holder with a marquee game, and the league is fully aware that some viewers won’t know how to find it. (Here’s my piece from last week on that topic.)
One thing Amazon has going for it, beyond a huge promotional budget: An all-time great play-by-play announcer in Al Michaels, who’s paired with Kirk Herbstreit.
“It wasn’t that long ago that I had no idea what streaming was, as did a lot of us,” Michaels said. “This was the opportunity that was out there for me, because my deal was up at NBC after 16 years on Sunday night. So, this was something that has been in the works for a while…
“I find it to be exciting in the sense that all of my friends and my kids and my grandkids all think this is about the coolest thing in the world. So even though it’s a different platform, the one thing I think you can count on, is that we are not going to reinvent the wheel. We’re going to do the games.
“People are going to tune in to watch the games, and we’re not going to do anything that’s crazy…I said to somebody, “They think we’re coming over the Rockies in a covered wagon.” I said, “We’re coming over the Rockies in broadband.’ We are the pioneers.”
Prime Video is included if you’re a member of Amazon’s Prime program ($14.99 a month or $139 a year), which offers accelerated and often-free shipping of Amazon purchases. Prime has more than 150 million members domestically.
You also can access the Thursday night games by signing up for Prime Video for $8.99 a month, an Amazon spokesman confirmed.
And Amazon struck a deal with DirecTV for the games to air in some sports bars and restaurants.
▪ Juggling Thursday night NFL games for Amazon and Saturday night college football games for ABC will make for a demanding next three months for Herbstreit, who also will continue to appear on ESPN’s popular “College Game Day.”
Herbstreit and Chris Fowler will call UM-Texas A&M at 9 p.m. Saturday on ESPN.
“It’s going to be taxing and tiring, but I’m looking forward to the challenge for sure,” Herbstreit said of his Thursday/Saturday schedule. “Obviously, the difference is now going into the NFL. And to me, Sunday has always been that day to just try to recoup and try to get your energy back ready for the next week. I won’t have that anymore, so Sunday will be a prep day for me now.”
Troy Aikman, who moved from Fox to ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” worked two games (Thursdays and Sundays) at least eight weeks each of the past four years and has given feedback to Herbstreit on how to handle it.
“I don’t envy him,” Aikman said. “It’s a lot, but he is a real pro. Anyone who has been around him knows that. He is relentless in his preparation, which is the only way you can tackle this. If you are not one of those guys, you get exposed just because the viewers know. You can’t fool people. I don’t know that you ever could, but you damn sure can’t now. They just know way too much.
“The last four years the schedule that we’ve kept, it’s grueling. Nobody cares. The viewers at home don’t care, nor should they, but I don’t know that anyone — I don’t even know that people in the industry realize how much preparation goes into broadcasting a one football game during the week, let alone trying to double up with two games in one week.”
▪ The Dolphins received a decent — but not great — 12.0 local rating for the opener against New England. That means 12 percent of Miami-Fort Lauderdale homes with TV sets were tuned in.
That’s comparable to past Dolphins openers — a bit better than some — but not any sort of ratings jump that some might have expected because of the heightened excitement and anticipation about this team.
One caveat: The rating would have been two to three points higher if those at the stadium were watching on TV.
Dolphins ratings, for years, have fallen well below the local ratings for most other NFL teams; Steelers and Packers games traditionally get ratings in the 30s and 40s in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, for example.
The Dolphins’ modest ratings in South Florida are a reflection of the community demographics (a significant number of TV viewers watch Spanish television) and the fact the market has a lot of transplants from the Northeast and elsewhere.
Dolphins games remain among the most-watched TV programs in South Florida. By comparison, Game 7 of the Heat-Celtics Eastern Conference Finals earlier this year also was viewed in 12 percent of Miami-Fort Lauderdale homes with TV sets.
▪ Joe Buck and Aikman gave ESPN’s Monday Night Football the feeling of importance that it lacked in recent years.
But ESPN’s production team made a mistake by putting the camera on them — and not the field — before Denver attempted and missed a 64-yard field goal late in Monday’s game at Seattle.
Because of that decision, Buck and Aikman had their back to the field, and they — as well as viewers — were surprised to see Denver’s kicker on the field.
With Buck and Aikman now calling MNF, there’s less incentive to watch the 10 ESPN2 MNF cablecasts featuring the Manning brothers. There remain too any awkward audio moments on those Manning-casts, including Shannon Sharpe and Eli Manning talking over each other during Monday’s fourth quarter.
Buck, asked if he will appear on other ESPN programs besides Monday Night Football: “As far as anything that’s baked into a contract, no. I think they just rely on us to say, well, we’re paying you guys an exorbitant amount of money, so if somebody asks you to come on TV, come on TV. Don’t be a putz.”
Buck and Aikman appeared on “SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt” after Monday’s opener.
ESPN executives believe the hiring of Buck and Aikman is one reason that ESPN’s schedule appears to be a a bit better than past years.
“These guys deserve a certain level of game, and the expectation is that the league sees that as well, and we will reap the benefit of that,” ESPN executive Stephanie Druly said. “We have an incredible schedule this year. I do think that the booth matters in the amount of quality you’re going to get.”
▪ ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” will get flexible scheduling in the second half of the season beginning in 2023.
“We have built in safeguards to do it far enough in advance,” NFL chief media officer Brian Rolapp said of the fact that some Monday games will be moved to Sunday — and vice versa — in the final seven weeks of the season beginning 2023.
What about people who buy tickets thinking they’re going to a Monday night game but can’t attend a game moved to a Sunday?
“If you need to unload a ticket that’s digital right now, it’s kind of easy to do,” Rolapp said. “It makes it easy to adjust plans if you want to.”
But Rolapp indicated the league is sensitive to disrupting the travel plans of fans. “We didn’t go as far on flexible schedule as we could have,” he said.
▪ Quick stuff: CBS assigned No. 3 NFL team Kevin Harlan and Trent Green to Dolphins-Ravens at 1 p.m. Sunday... Larry Fitzgerald, the former Arizona Cardinals All Pro receiver, was a smart, late addition to ESPN’s Monday NFL Countdown... Hailey Sutton, who spent less than a year as NBC 6’s No. 2 sportscaster, is leaving to take an in-house reporter’s job with her hometown Dallas Cowboys.
