Before Peter Schrager made a high-profile move to ESPN this spring, he spent years as one of the hosts of Fox NFL Kickoff early each Sunday morning.
Batting leadoff ahead of the popular Fox NFL Sunday with Terry Bradshaw and Co., Schrager helped draw pretty significant viewership as the only network pregame show on television in its window. But with the news that the league wants to eventually move toward a full 17-game package of overseas games, Schrager is worried that everything could change.
“We’d have crazy ratings on our little Kickoff show that was before the big one, that was from 11-12 Eastern,” Schrager explained this week in an appearance on Pardon My Take. “But when they would have these international games, nobody watched.”
As the NFL has consistently proven while stealing Christmas Day from the NBA or even putting games exclusively on streaming platforms, people will go out of their way to watch football. Especially when the only other option is a studio show.
“You’d rather watch any game than a pregame show talking about the other games,” Schrager added.
“So you’d go over to ESPN or NFL Network or wherever it was, and those games started at 9:30 Eastern. It’s usually in the fourth quarter when the pregame show’s going on. If you have 16 (international) games, my question is does that single-handedly cripple the idea of a Sunday pregame show? I feel like most fans, even if it’s Jaguars-Titans or it’s Saints-Bucs … you watch the game over hearing what the guys have to say about the games coming up.”
Of course, there’s a huge financial incentive for the NFL to keep expanding its international schedule. After experimenting in England, Germany, and Brazil over the years, the league is playing in Spain and Ireland this fall. Commissioner Roger Goodell has mentioned Asia as a potential game site as well.
If the league can build a schedule in which each week features a game overseas, it could sell an early-morning window to new broadcast partners.
That could mean, as Peter Schrager notes, the end of the longtime tradition of pregame shows on ESPN, NFL Network, Fox and CBS.
“It’s kind of cool, but I’m a sentimental guy,” he said. “I’d like to think those pregame shows still exist, even if there’s games in that window.”
The networks that do not have game rights in that 9 a.m. ET slot will, of course, want NFL programming. Pregame shows wouldn’t die off immediately. But if people consistently tuned into games instead of studio shows, they could die off over time.