Hillary Clinton (Kate McKinnon) and Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin) in an skit from Saturday Night Live just six nights following the 2nd presidential debate on Sunday. (NBCUniversal Media, LLC.)
By Josh Albarran - October 17, 2016
The Sunday Night Football game of New York Giants vs. Green Bay Packers on October 9th forces NBC to skip live coverage of the 2nd Presidential Debate between nominates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in order to gain more ratings for its NFL game.
Mainly some of the moments of their debate coverage from NBC News would make it to an Saturday Night Live skit, but since the network wasn't broadcasting the debate for football, the show used graphics from its sister network MSNBC. That debate from Sunday was moderated by Anderson Cooper of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC; and featured Alec Baldwin played Trump and Kate McKinnon as Clinton.
The Packers went on to defeated Giants 23-16. The ratings for the game had an 10.2 rating on NBC while the debate had at least 16.0 rating on CBS according to TVNewser, so we know who won that night besides the candidates or the teams.
The NFL Wild-Card is on ABC and ESPN this Saturday at 3pm ET. (ESPN Inc./ABC Inc.)
For the first time in 10 years, the NFL returns to the ABC Television Network tomorrow as the Disney-owned broadcast network will broadcast the AFC Wild-Card matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans to officially kick-off the 2015 NFL Playoffs. The game will also air regularly on ESPN for the 2nd convective year.
The ESPN Monday Night Football team of play-by-play Mike Tirico, color commentator Jon Gruden and sideline reporter Lisa Salters will call the action from NGR Stadium in Houston, Texas. A special Saturday playoff edition of ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown will precede the game at 3pm ET on both the ABC Television Network and ESPN with host Chris Berman and analysts Tom Jackson, Cris Carter, Keyshawn Johnson and Mike Dikta from the ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut \ while on-site host Suzy Kobler and analysts Ray Lewis, Trent Dilfer and Steve Young will reported from the stadium. Berman will host the halftime show from the Bristol studios.
The last time ABC broadcast an NFL game was Super Bowl XL which Tirico, Kobler and Berman also part the broadcast through ABC Sports' then-partnership with sister company ESPN (before Disney merging the two sports operations into one several months later). In the past two years, its owned-and-operated and flagship station WABC-TV in New York preempted ABC network programming when they carried a Monday Night Football game involving the Giants using the ESPN feed (including the season opener in 2014 in a loss at Detroit and recently this past season on the road in a win at Miami), this station and the rest of ABC affiliates however will mainly use the ABC network feed for Saturday's wild-card game despite it's a simulcast with ESPN but with separated presentation as with FOX broadcast network's news coverage with its sister cable news channel.
ABC and ESPN are owned by The Walt Disney Company.
ABC announced today that the Notre-Dame-Temple college football game will be televised on Saturday, October 31st at 8:00pm ET/5:00pm PT on Halloween night. The network said however following the loss of ABC and its sister channel ESPN's late-season NASCAR telecast to the National Broadcasting Company's NBC and NBCSN networks last summer, originally a "bye week" would be included in October, which was on the last one (the 31st) in order to avoid compelling with the World Series telecast on Fox (in which Game 4 of the Fall Classic will take place on the same night). Now with the big announcement from ESPN, there will now be some competition after all on Halloween (unless a rained out in a World Series game if needed), stay tuned.
FOX is owned by 21st Century Fox.
ABC and ESPN are owned by The Walt Disney Company with Hearst Corporation owning a mintory share of ESPN.
"Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Vince McMahon at Madison Square Garden for Monday Night Raw in 1997. (WWE/MSG Media, Inc.)
A few weeks ago on September 4th, it was the twentieth anniversary of the Monday Night Wars between Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (now the WWE) and Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling unit as WCW launched Monday Nitro live on TNT to go head-to-head against WWE's Monday Night Raw on the USA Network. On the night, however Raw was pre-empted on USA in conflict of the U.S. Open tennis coverage allows WCW to receive strong completion thanks to the appearance of the then-recent former WWE wrestler Lex Luger appearing on Nitro during the start of the Sting-Ric Flair match:
The rest was history with Hulk Hogan forming the nWo, the birth of Austin 3:16, the mysterious Sting in black & white, the X-rated trio of D-Generation X, the Montreal Screwjob, Goldberg's historic undefeated streak, The Rock's new attitude and many many more that once hit the cable television ratings for many years until the WWE brought WCW in 2001 when the war ended (something we never seen since McMahon launched WrestleMania or Turner buying the NWA which would become WCW back in the 1980s). I talked with Eric Bischoff, the former president of WCW on Twitter back on Sept. 4th, "It was a great moment in time." Bischoff said to me and "Its a pressure to look back and see just how much Nitro changed the industry forever."
Steve McMichael, Eric Bischoff and Bobby "The Brain" Heeman at the broadcast booth of WCW Monday Nitro during its glory days. (WWE)
The Monday Night War represents all the action that is between "professional wrestling" and "sports entertainment" for all hardcore wrestling fans (didn't meant to those fans in ECW, that's another story!) who were watching either Raw or Nitro back in the 1990s. The WWE side was led by McMahon, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H, Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, Kane and many more while the WCW side was led by Turner and Bischoff, "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Goldberg, Sting, Ric Flair and others. Below, Triple H and Sting discuss the battle between WWE and WCW during the Monday Night War:
To this day, fans are still talking about the Monday Night War and the rivalry between WWE and WCW & its larger-than-life superstars changed the landscape of both wrestling and entertainment forever. There will never a wrestling war like this that revolutionizes us!
ESPN SportsCenter regular daytime anchors Hannah Storm, Chris McKendry and Linda Cohn.
I was watching ESPN the past day for SportsCenter and all the sudden, what couldn't been more better when the viewers spend the next 6 or 9 straight hours of hard-working professional women hosting SportsCenter, that hit an grand slam for women anchoring working at the Walt Disney Company. Regular anchors Hannah Storm, Chris McKendry and Linda Cohn had to anchored their daytime shows with substitute (and yes women) anchors Jaymee Sire, Cari Champion and Nicole Biscole. Their partners Kevin Negandhi, Jay Crawford and David Lloyd were away and that sounded that would helped the espnW division to put that moment to their playbooks.
When SportsCenter hit live at 9am ET (6am PT), it was Hannah and Jaymee kick-off the first two hours, then toss it over to Chris and Cari for the next two and finally to Linda and Nicole for the next two (the show was moved to ESPNews in the 2pm ET hour). When Cohn and Biscole signed off at 3pm ET, the day doesn't stop as Michele Steele anchored SportsCenter for the next three hours and afterwards, it was an ballgame.
But it wasn't the first time the show has its "girl-power" experience on the anchor chair, remember back in October 2010 when Storm and Cohn (back then the daytime shows had two shows with 3 hours each until before cutting to three live shows with 2 hours each in early 2013) anchored three hours of SportsCener with Linda said this before turning it over to McKendry and then-SportsCenter anchor Sage Steele for the next three live hours that "Never in my 18 years here have there been back-to-back sets of women anchors hosting SportsCenter," said Cohn and it was indeed back-to-back. Until yesterday for Hannah, Chris and Linda with addition to Michele on News, let's just say it was back-to-back-to-back-to-back and well done to these women at ESPN doing their best to keep us the sports fan entertaining and well watched.
The FOX NFL Sunday team of Curt Menefee, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Jimmy Johnson and Michael Strahan, the No. 1 NFL pregame show was FOX Sports' first studio program back in 1994. (Fox Broadcasting Company, Inc.)
In August 2013, America's then-new sports network FOX Sports 1 first hit the airwaves and a month later launched FOX NFL Kickoff as an one-hour lead-in to the FOX NFL Sunday pregame show over on the FOX Broadcast Network. Now as of Tuesday, FOX Sports announced that FOX NFL Kickoff will make its move from FS1 to FOX starting on Sunday, September, 13th at 11am ET. With that FOX's NFL studio coverage will be expanded to two hours compared to four hours each on both ESPN, NFL and CBS Sports Network (NBC which owns the Sunday night package does not had a Sunday morning NFL pregame show over on its cable channel NBCSN although was planned to aired it back in 2012, but never worked out).
Chris Wallace is the anchor of FOX's Sunday morning news program Fox News Sunday and Wallace (a Washington Redskins fan) had the NFL Sunday crew on the show twice during FOX's Super Bowl Sunday coverage.
Meanwhile it does not effect the timing of FOX's other Sunday morning program FOX News Sunday (which premiered in 1996 two years after FOX NFL Sunday debuted as a pre-launched date of its producer Fox News Channel), which airs on the network every Sunday at 9:00am ET (or later in the hour or two on some FOX affiliates). For example in the New York market, FOX News Sunday airs at 10:00am ET and during the NFL season it was followed by a half-hour or an hour of local programming leading up to NFL Sunday or on a Sunday when a New York Giants plays a FOX game a half-hour pregame show would followed until FOX NFL Sunday takes over.
According to an report from the SportsBusiness Journal, FOX affiliates including its owned-and-operated stations were asked to had an extra-hour of NFL programming in the morning hours with addition to FOX NFL Sunday and FOX NFL Kickoff as the clear-cup winner to providing more FOX attitude and lots of football talk for the next two hours on the FOX Network. As for Fox News Sunday, will continue to air on the broadcast network on select times (most would air prior to FOX Sports' NFL coverage) along with re-airs on Fox News Channel at 2:00pm ET and 6:00pm ET.
ABC and ESPN's Robin Roberts and editor Josh Albarran at the Special Olympics television taping.
On Tuesday, Robin Roberts stopped by at the James J. Walker Recreation Park near 721M/City-As-School across Houston Street to tape segments for the ESPN special to be broadcast on both ABC and ESPN before the Special Olympics games which will begin on Saturday, July 25th in Los Angeles.
Roberts, current co-anchor of ABC's Good Morning America and former ESPN SportsCenter anchor will participated in the Disney's sports networks coverage of the Special Olympics World Games LA2015 from July 25-August 2nd on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 (also streaming on the WatchABC and WatchESPN apps). The 721M Soccer Team had held practices on both June 3rd and 23rd to be in front of the television cameras and they are excited as the games are, the latter of which Roberts interviewed the Special Olympics chairman Tim Shriver.
In addition, Roberts told yours truly that she will return to the ESPYs this year held in Los Angeles. Her Arthur Ashe Courage Award speech from the 2013 event as seen on ESPN was emotional when Robin worked very hard to battle breast cancer as well as her TV career at the Walt Disney Company. Speaking of The ESPYs, it will be televised live on Wednesday, July 15th at 8pm ET/7pm CT for the first time on ESPN's sister channel ABC.
Again, the Special Olympics World Games LA2015 will be held in Los Angeles from July 25-August 28th and can be seen live or taped on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.
