'Flex' concept looking like sweet deal for NBC

[bengaldee]

usatoday.com
The NFL announced Tuesday the first Sunday prime-time game on NBC resulting from the new flexible scheduling. The choice was less than dramatic: It was a game — Chicago Bears-New York Giants in Week 10 — that the league (unofficially) assigned to NBC when it came out with its schedule in April. Says NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, "We never picked it."
Flex scheduling will start in Week 10 and cover Sunday night games for the rest of the year except Christmas Eve in Week 16. NBC was assigned games, but they haven't been announced as the league wants the flexibility to move an afternoon game from Fox or CBS to replace a scheduled NBC contest that turned out to be a dud.

Over the seven weeks of flex scheduling, Fox and CBS each can protect five games — but only one on any given weekend — that had not been already assigned to NBC. Then if NBC bails on a game it's been assigned, it won't be able to get at any of Fox's or CBS' protected games, which those networks designated after Week 4.

NBC keeping Chicago-New York was a no-brainer, given those are big-market teams with winning records. Neither Fox nor CBS protected games that weekend, logically figuring NBC would stick with the Bears-Giants.

Things could get more interesting in Week 11. Let's say NBC was assigned the Nov. 19 Washington Redskins-Tampa Bay Buccaneers game, a matchup between teams with losing records that might have looked good in April. Exactly the kind of game flex-scheduling is supposed to keep from going national in prime time. So CBS, logically, would protect that day's marquee Indianapolis Colts-Dallas Cowboys game while Fox, presumably, would reserve the big-drawing Bears (at the New York Jets.)

So let's take this parlor game to its conclusion. NBC's Nov. 19 game, which must be assigned at least 12 days in advance, might end up taking Fox's Atlanta Falcons-Baltimore Ravens or San Diego Chargers-Denver Broncos or CBS' Cincinnati Bengals-New Orleans Saints. And, NBC's Ebersol says, let's not hear any grousing from Fox or CBS: "They knew what they were buying into" when they made their current NFL deals.

Eavesdropping: Peteris Saltans, Fox's lead baseball audio mixer, calculates the network is deploying 87 microphones on its World Series coverage. While he'd like to mike the pitcher's mound and "it would be great to get mikes in the outfield itself," the only on-field mikes are in the bases.

And around the bases, and with the mikes eavesdropping on the area around home plate, Saltans is alert for language not suitable for family audiences: "You just keep microphones closed if things get heated."

Saltans, in a production truck under the stadium, mixes and matches sounds from all those mikes — like balls clanging off foul poles that, naturally, are miked — and mixes them in with the patter from Fox's announcers.

The challenge, he says, is calling up the right sounds to match Fox's visual approach to baseball — constantly cutting between different cameras to turn a relatively slow sport into overly caffeinated TV. So when Fox cuts to a shot of, say, somebody warming up in a bullpen, Saltans opens the bullpen mikes.

But he needn't worry about the various sound effects — like whooshes— that Fox brings to baseball. Says Saltans, "Machines trigger the sound effects, and determine which ones get played."

Record: Remember being glued to Ross Perot and Al Gore debating NAFTA on CNN's Larry King Live in 1993 and thinking no other cable TV show would ever draw as big an audience? Well, we were all wrong.

ESPN's Giants-Cowboys Monday Night Football game drew 11.8 million households, breaking the King show's 11.2 million that was the cable TV record. It also drew another 600,000 households on over-the-air TV in the teams' home markets. So MNF is averaging 8.9% of all U.S. TV households — just 20% lower than the household averages for Sunday night games on NBC, which reaches about 20 million more homes than ESPN does.

Randy Falco, president of NBC's TV group, told Broadcasting & Cable in April that NBC's Sunday night ratings "will probably be twice as high" as ESPN's MNF. Not likely. But while NBC gets the benefit of flexible scheduling, MNF faces some potholes — like its Jets-Miami Dolphins game Christmas night.