Television networks ride football gravy train on U.S. Thanksgiving
BULLS OF THE WEEK
It’s not quite the size of the Super Bowl juggernaut that takes place each February or the NFL conference championships every January, but this last week in November is still a big week for the business of football in North America.
In Canada, it’s the Vanier Cup on Saturday and the Grey Cup on Sunday.
South of the border, the NFL is coming off an epic edition of Monday Night Football and its traditional American Thanksgiving Day triple-header. It’s also rivalry weekend in NCAA college football.
No one has had a more bullish week than the NFL and its TV rights partners in the United States (NBC, FOX, CBS and ESPN) and Canada (CTV and TSN).
The Monday Night Football matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and Kansas City Chiefs wasn’t the Mexico City special it was supposed to be, but it more than recovered from being relocated on less than a week’s notice.
The L.A. Coliseum filled in just five days and the game was a record-setter on so many fronts, from 105 total points to 892 yards passing and a rodeo-like finish — the Rams won 54-51 — that resulted in the most watched MNF since 2014.
When ESPN is tallying an average U.S. viewership of more than 16 million, it’s not only making its advertisers and subscribers happy, it’s passing along the fan engagement to all of the other TV and radio rights holders on Thanksgiving Day and throughout Week 12.
BEARS OF THE WEEK
The Vanier Cup will hope to reverse a down cycle for the game that’s emblematic of Canadian university football supremacy on Saturday at the University of Laval in Quebec City.
As charted by Vancouver varsity football broadcaster Jim Mullin, English TV ratings for the Vanier Cup have fallen to less than one-quarter of what they were in 2011 and 2012, when the game was packaged as part of the Grey Cup Festival. TSN drew an average national audience of 665,000 for the 2011 game at B.C. Place Stadium and 502,000 for 2012 at the Rogers Centre.
It’s since sunk to a low of 168,000 last year on Sportsnet for what is now a stand-alone game.
It just makes no financial sense to play the Vanier Cup outside of the Grey Cup Festival. U Sports, the Canadian governing body for university sports in general, may have thought a separate TV deal with Sportsnet would lead to more exposure, more prestige and more revenues, but it has brought none of those.
The missed opportunity is the existing infrastructure of the five-day Grey Cup Festival, especially in terms of crosspromotion between the CFL and Canadian university football.
Since the Vanier Cup deal was inked, Sportsnet won national NHL rights on a blockbuster $5.2-billion, 12-year deal that quite rightly consumes its focus over college football programming.
Instead of cross-promotional vignettes promoting the university game to CFL followers and the CFL to young varsity football fans across the country, the Vanier Cup and U Sports find themselves in a bad place. It’s time to revisit the current broadcast complications and find ways to bring the Grey Cup and Vanier Cup back under one roof.
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