The one thing I hate about the Rams game already...
That’s what “dealing with it” is, Dave. I don’t know you to be so pedantic - why now?
Maybe it's pedantic, whatever, but moving on.
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.
Yes, they do the juggling act when they set the schedule before the season for all 18 weeks of the schedule. The way I originally read it was they deal with it every week during the season, which is obviously not the case. That was just me misreading your phrasing. My contention is simply that west coast teams getting the 1 pm ET kickoff vs east coast teams is the norm, and the 4 pm kickoff is the exception. Now I grant that the NY and LA teams being in the same market does make scheduling a little more complicated, but there are 5 and up to 6 time slots to choose from in a normal given week, and home/away games are also factored in.
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.
Agreed.
Both teams cannot be served to the Los Angeles market at 10am local time.
Certainly. Of course, they could have flipped the Falcons/Chargers and Rams/Saints start times or run either of the games at one of the other 7 start times this week being there were the 3 start times on TG day and one Friday and the four start times today and tomorrow. But, this is how they drew it up. So, idk.
It creates viewership conflict which squashes ratings. I don’t know what else to tell you.
I didn't argue otherwise.
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).
Yes. And I dunno, it seems the Chargers got the short end of it with the extra time zone over compared to the Rams, but of course, so does other west coast teams making that same trip.
Once in thirty years, I already demonstrated that. The league also probably heard from Superdome operations staff about how strenuous that stadium turnaround was.
Not doubting you, but I wasn't aware the league was told that. And as to the once in 30 years, that's clearly because there were other considerations and scheduling that made the issue moot. You shouldn't count the times where the BC wasn't the day before a given Sunday afternoon game because it had no bearing on the schedule decision-making.
1/272 is statistically insignificant
Where do you get 1/272?
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.
A lot of this is determined before the season and the schedulers don't know how a given team will do during the upcoming season. I'm sure there are metrics they use, fan base size, viewership, ticket sales etc that factor in setting the schedule. I'm not saying it's all arbitrary. But I am saying that it wouldn't surprise me that there is definitely some occasional arbitrary decision making going on at times. If the league has an agenda with some teams, they can and do do what they want. It's not that hard.
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.
And as I stated, people can come to their own conclusions either way. We all won't come to the same conclusions, and that's perfectly fine.
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.
I appreciate the research. I definitely learned a bit from the discussion. :9:
Who dat!