NFL broadcast planner Mike North thinks the end of the Monday Night Football doubleheader is good for everyone involved, even if he doesn’t understand why the premise didn’t work.
On The Schrager Hour with Peter Schrager, North offered his take on the end of the experiment and why the single-game format is better for ESPN, the ManningCast, and the ABC simulcast heading into 2026.
“Yes, the Monday night doubleheaders are a thing of the past,” North said. “I don’t know why that didn’t work. Quite honestly, I thought it was fine. I thought it was good for us. That Monday night game, if it wasn’t your game on Monday, it would’ve been Sunday at 1, among eight, nine, or 10 other games. You probably weren’t going to watch it anyway. Having it on Monday, a national broadcast… it just didn’t work. The fans didn’t appreciate it, and it probably wasn’t a good use of an NFL asset.”
The NFL officially ended the doubleheaders at its annual league meetings in April, with media VP Hans Schroeder acknowledging that fans “felt they were conflicted to choose between those games.” Schroeder had already admitted in the fall that the experiment had not “delivered yet” what either side expected when the arrangement was agreed to as part of the 2021 media rights deal. Last season, there were doubleheaders during Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 7 — some staggered, some concurrent — and the ratings consistently reflected a split audience that neither broadcast benefited from.
The four games ESPN returned to the NFL as part of its deal to acquire NFL Network were initially reported to be headed to YouTube and Netflix, but YouTube balked at splitting the inventory with Netflix, leaving those games on the open market. Fox picked up one of them, creating the first-ever primetime tripleheader in broadcast television history in Week 10, while NBC landed one alongside Netflix’s expanded package.
“Two of those four went to Netflix for a Wednesday night and Saturday of Week 18, and the other two went to broadcast,” North added. “It’s not like everything went to streamers; they went to broadcast, and I think the upside to Monday night, now, is instead of having to bifurcate your resources, all eyes on the big Monday night game, simulcast on ABC, good for Peyton and Eli on the ManningCast. You’ve got some big games on Monday Night Football this year, let’s get everyone pulling in the same direction.”
The data have consistently shown that MNF broadcasts draw considerably larger audiences when simulcast on ABC than when airing exclusively on ESPN. The league’s Week 1 2024 broadcast drew 20.5 million viewers across ESPN, ABC, and ESPN2, compared to just over 15 million the following week when the ABC simulcast was not in place. With the doubleheader gone and a single marquee game on the schedule each Monday, ESPN and the NFL can put the full weight of the ABC simulcast behind one game instead of splitting resources across two. And with ESPN hosting its first-ever Super Bowl at the end of the 2026 season, the network has every incentive to make Monday night feel like an event again.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.