The one thing I hate about the Rams game already...
They don't deal with it every week. The schedule is determined well before the season starts and the schedulers and teams know the situation in terms of logistics of two teams at 1 stadium.
That’s what “dealing with it” is, Dave. I don’t know you to be so pedantic - why now?
It's not really relevant to setting the the start time at 3 pm.
Yes it is. One team gets the morning kick (west coast parlance, as the game begins at 10am their time) one team gets the afternoon kick (1pm). The exception is when one of the LA/NY market teams plays on not-Sunday, then the viewing market is usually given the mid-slot Game of the Week. They do this juggling act for all eighteen weeks of the season to capture as much of the combined ~35 million viewer market as possible for LA/NY, whether the local team(s) are on or not.
The long-held CBS/FOX split along conference lines has a lot to do with it. It’s less rigid now, but FOX outbid CBS for all NFC road games in 1994, and NBC was outbid by CBS four years later for all AFC road games.
There's no legitimate reason for then to set is at 3 pm in this case, even considering the Bayou Classic.
Both teams cannot be served to the Los Angeles market at 10am local time. It creates viewership conflict which squashes ratings. I don’t know what else to tell you. The Chargers are going an extra time zone over and were also not expected to be as good, which is why it’s a B-level game, being shown only to Atlanta metro, Los Angeles metro, and up the west coast to Eugene (because Justin Herbert).
The noon (1 pm ET) start time was used before in a home game the day after the BC, so that's not really a reason.
Once in thirty years, I already demonstrated that. The league also probably heard from Superdome operations staff about how strenuous that stadium turnaround was.
No matter how you parse it, this was an arbitrary decision made by the schedulers. The only question is whether we think it was intentional or not.
1/272 is statistically insignificant
Almost all west coast trips to the east coast are in the 1 pm time slots. The 4 pm slot isn't anywhere near the norm as already been pointed out.
I’m doing a deeper look at this and don’t have enough to prove anything either way, but I’m finding that opponent prestige and potential matchup stakes are impacting kick times. I just made up a statistic called WCRTSNEK (west coast, road trip, Sunday, non-early kickoff) and entering this week’s games, the Rams will have two such games (a 26-20 OT loss on SNF @ DET in week 1, Sunday mid @ NO this week). San Fran has played one (38-10 loss to GB, kicked at 4:25) and are scheduled for a 4:25pm kick @ MIA in week 16. Seattle and Arizona don’t get to do it at all this season. Looking at the AFC, the Raiders and Chargers don’t get any either. The best chance either AFC team may have had, in a vacuum, was week 3’s LAC@PIT game, but CBS was already carrying MIA@SEA and CAR@LVR, which both had to be second slot kicks. Again demonstrating that these things are rarely as simple as “just put it over there instead, they won’t notice” - and also, in order for the west coast team to get the late kick, they have to have some prestige, and so does their opponent, but it probably means the opponent is going to win because they have to be good enough and well-liked enough to get that draw in the first place. SF-GB was game of the week.
I'm not saying it's devious because I'm not privy to what goes on behind the scenes, but considering numerous actions that the NFL has taken against teams who haven't towed the company lines on a number of issues, and Goodell's penchant for being petty and vindictive, it's not a stretch to think there's something to the trends.
I’m just not able to get here, and in looking up this stuff to reply with more information instead of hoping to have a feeling confirmed, I’ve probably been pushed further away from this conclusion.
Big thanks to pro football reference for easily-sortable team season schedules and 506sports for their tv market maps, both of which helped me learn more about this topic.
:gosaints: