NFL Announces Massive Change To ‘Monday Night Football’ That’s A Win-Win For Everyone
This article was originally published on Total Pro Sports.
The NFL has made a giant change to the ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’ schedule that is sure to be met with universal praise.
For many years, the NFL would schedule a single ‘Monday Night Football’ doubleheader in Week 1. But after the league signed new broadcast contracts in 2021, it decided to experiment with a handful of dual ‘MNF’ broadcasts. This included five doubleheaders alone for the 2025 season.
Of course, the doubleheaders didn’t sit well with every fan. The tradition has been to have one ‘MNF’ game a week, and time zone differences didn’t always make the doubleheaders convenient or exciting for some fans.
Per Myles Simmons of Pro Football Talk, the league has decided to scrap ‘MNF’ doubleheaders altogether. NFL Media EVP and Chief Operating Officer Hans Schroeder acknowledged that the strategy didn’t go as planned during a press conference:
“This speaks to another theme of how we’re always talking to our partners. One of the things we realized with Disney collectively, when we did the deal five years ago, we thought adding two games on Monday night would be a great thing for fans. It was more free football that was outside of a Sunday afternoon. And I think we collectively struggled and realized fans felt like they were conflicted to choose between those games.
“And so, as we worked through that and part of that transaction related to the sale of NFL Network, one of the things that surfaced was there’s a better way for us to deploy those four games.”
That leaves the NFL with five regular season games that need to be assigned a broadcast going forward. Per Simmons, Schroeder added that one possibility would be to schedule a game on Thanksgiving Eve.
The league released the schedule in May. So, we won’t have to wait too much longer to learn of the 2026 ‘MNF’ schedule.
ESPN & ‘Monday Night Football’ Crew Will Air Super Bowl 61
ESPN and ‘MNF’ will be under the microscope more during the 2025 regular season, as they will broadcast Super Bowl 61 next year. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, who joined ESPN in 2022, will be on the call.
This will be ESPN’s first television broadcast of the Super Bowl. ABC aired Super Bowl 40 between the Seattle Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Al Michaels and the late John Madden called the game.
Super Bowl 60 between the Seahawks and the New England Patriots was aired by NBC Sports. Play-by-play man Mike Tirico called his first Super Bowl, with Cris Collinsworth serving as the analyst.
