NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” is the highest-rated program on television, but that’s not enough for NBC.

“We’ve …made a few changes because you can’t sit on your hands,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group at Monday’s TCA.

For starters, Josh Elliott, who this year left ABC’s “Good Morning America” to join NBC Sports, will join NBC’s pre-game show, “Football Night in America,” where he will do interviews and features.

On Aug. 17, NBC Sports Network will launch the NBCSN Sunday Sports Report, which will air every Sunday night. During football season, that show will feature Elliott, Cris Collinsworth, Michelle Tafoya, Hines Ward and other NBC Sports talent to “touch on the recap of the entire NFL weekend as well as a full update of all sports that took place throughout the weekend,” said Lazarus.

For the first time, Telemundo sister network, mun2, will simulcast five NFL games, including Super Bowl XLIX.

“Sunday Night Football,” with its mammoth viewership, has been a key part of NBC’s turnaround, and the company also hopes to use its relationship with the NFL to promote its growing sports network, NBC Sports.

“The relationship with the NFL is an important one for our entire company, for all of NBCUniversal,” said Lazarus. “As it relates directly to NBC Sports Network, we do cover NFL in some of our news and information programming and pro football talk. We do fantasy shows. Those are not, quote/unquote, licensed shows from the NFL, but they do cover the sport of football. We do ‘NFL Turning Point’ in association with the NFL. And having the ability to use ‘Sunday Night Football’ to promote our 24 hour sports network is a valuable resource and part of the value of our NFL contract.”

The NFL season kicks off on September 4 with the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks taking on the Green Bay Packers. “Sunday Night Football” starts its season with another big game, the Denver Broncos versus the Indianapolis Colts on Sept. 8. Overall, NBC will 19 NFL games this season, including a wild-card game, a divisional play-off game and the Super Bowl from Arizona.

This season will be the first that another major broadcast network, CBS, will air NFL games on Thursday night, with eight scheduled for this fall. Lazarus was confident that the additional broadcast night of games would make no difference to Sunday night audience numbers, which have skyrocketed partly due to the popularity of fantasy football and social media.

“Just to put some context to that, the shift from NFL Network to CBS for those eight games, which is the only change to this year’s schedule, will add less than 3 percent to the total ratings pool of NFL. So … it doesn’t materially change the amount of exposure,” Lazarus said.

Still, the CBS deal only runs for one year and NBC plans to aggressively bid for the package when it’s up again next year, said “Sunday Night Football” Executive Producer Fred Gaudelli in an post-panel interview.

To get it all started, NBC Sports freshened up its opener, “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night,” featuring Carrie Underwood again singing the theme song as well as a dozen NFL stars. A two-and-a-half minute behind-the-scenes trailer will debut July 25 in 19,000 theaters, said Gaudelli, with the new open scheduled to launch with the new season.

Tags:


  Save as PDF