The New York Jets and Miami Dolphins will kick off Monday night at 7:15 p.m. ET on ESPN. The Cincinnati Bengals and Denver Broncos will then play even more Monday Night Football, starting an hour later on ABC.
ESPN and its Disney-owned sister network have spent the last three seasons experimenting with concurrent MNF action, aiming to bring the chaotic energy of an NFL Sunday afternoon—and maybe even a March Madness Sunday afternoon—to Monday evenings. But rather than appreciating the extra game, a number of fans have balked at the additional football. Even for the world’s richest sports league, less is sometimes more.
Compared to last year, ESPN swapped two nights of overlapping games this season for a pair of 7 and 10 p.m. ET doubleheaders. And as early as 2026, it could be done with the overlapping contests altogether, as it awaits regulatory approval of an NFL Network takeover that would see it exchange four Monday Night Football games for games that could be played at other times. “We’re getting out of this side-by-side business,” ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said after the acquisition was announced.
Dueling MNF broadcasts emerged from the NFL’s most recent distribution overhaul, as ESPN came away with a total of 21 games to air across 17 regular season Monday nights (after one slot initially tabbed for international play on ESPN+ was shifted to a primetime affair). The complexities of both the NFL schedule and ABC’s existing programming blocks prevented the partners from being able to assign teams 10 p.m. ET starts on a regular basis.
And execs on both sides of the partnership extolled the possibility of creating a supersized evening both in terms of action for fans and audience for advertisers by leveraging ABC alongside ESPN.
“The whole desire is, how do we create a new and different and compelling way for fans to watch games?” NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder said in 2023.
At the time, ESPN had extra motivation to shake things up. Monday Night Football ratings had been roughly flat from 2014 to 2020, before the current agreements were negotiated, as ESPN cycled through multiple announcing booth combinations while facing questions about the strength of its slate and attempting to improve its relationship with NFL decision makers. Increasing the use of ABC’s reach with overlapping games wouldn’t solve those problems overnight, but at least it represented a new direction.
And yet, as soon as the plan went into effect, Monday Night Football’s conditions changed. A reported $30+ million per year helped ESPN lure Joe Buck and Troy Aikman in 2022. The 2023 writers’ strike opened up airtime on ABC on a weekly basis and contributed to a 29% jump in ratings. That same year, ESPN gained the ability to “flex out” relatively weak matchups late in the season for better games. And then there was the Manningcast, which leveraged Peyton and Eli’s popularity to differentiate Monday Night Football beginning in 2021.
Combined audiences for two Monday Night Football games are still greater than one, but not tremendously so. Each game has generally netted fewer viewers than the average MNF broadcast that season, with the less-watched affair averaging slightly more than 5 million viewers across three weeks last year. That’s a great number for basically any television offering … besides primetime football. For reference, boosted by a new ratings methodology this summer, a couple preseason games topped 5 million.
“At times the sentiment is [fans are] forced to choose, and I think in our minds, it’s just additional choice, which is a good thing,” Schroeder said in an interview. “I’m not sure it’s delivered exactly yet what we thought it would, but we’re going to continue working and look at it and ultimately push to figure out the best model for our fans.”
ESPN has continued to simulcast a number of its standalone games on ABC, consistently seeing a boost in overall audience as a result. Getting on broadcast was a key driver behind Operation Overlap, but now a single marquee matchup is enough to play across both nationally distributed networks.
The actual games being played factor into the strategy’s success too. Just look at the Sept. 29 matchups, which held potential going into the season but will now feature two 0-3 teams in the earlier window before a Joe Burrow-less Bengals squad faces a Denver group coming off two close losses.
Years into ESPN’s experiments, the network’s initial vision of two big-time matchups playing out simultaneously has rarely come to pass, even if the strategy has brought games that otherwise likely would’ve aired for only a regional audience on Sunday afternoon to football fans nationwide.
Along the way, ESPN has tweaked its schedule. This year, the two overlapping sets of games start at 7:15 and 8:15 pm ET respectively—after 7:30/8:15, 8:00/8:30 and 8:15/9:00 splits were tested in the past—to minimize the games’ combined window while maintaining the standard 8:15 game start time. Earlier starts, compared to 10 p.m. (or later) kickoffs, also expand the pool of teams available to play in the games.
In both cases this year, the first game begins on ESPN, followed by the second on ABC. Doubleheaders have returned in two other weeks, with the first game simulcast across ESPN and ABC each time. And all of ESPN’s multi-game nights play out by Week 7, when hope still at least smolders in almost every NFL city. ESPN has also dropped the ESPN+ exclusive game this year in exchange for more widely available distribution.
“We’re always just looking to figure out how we can maximize and optimize our schedule kind of full stop across the board,” ESPN VP, programming and acquisitions Tim Reed said in an interview. “In 2021, the notion of it being obvious that true doubleheaders would drive better individual game ratings vs. overlap, we didn’t really know that.”
ESPN’s NFL Media acquisition is a complex, multi-component agreement, but studying the evolution of ESPN’s MNF strategy helps elucidate a single part of the swap. ESPN is netting three additional NFL games, by way of a seven-for-four swap, taking over what had been the NFL Network’s portfolio and shipping back—for all intents and purposes—the four bonus Monday Night Football games it has labored to maximize. Pitaro and Disney CEO Bob Iger have boasted that the deal expands the company’s number of “clean windows” with a single NFL game being played to 28, up from a current 19.
However, the game rights change is contingent on the larger ESPN-NFL deal passing Department of Justice review, which seems increasingly unlikely to come before the NFL plots its 2026 calendar. In that case, ESPN would have no choice but to continue working away on its 21-games-in-17-weeks puzzle.
Additional reporting by Anthony Crupi
(This story has been updated in the second-to-last paragraph to reflect a company error regarding the current number of “clean windows.”)
