The end of Monday Night Football

Well, yesterday was the last time that Monday Night Football was to be aired on ABC, a broadcast network. It has now formally moved to ESPN, although both companies are owned by Disney. ESPN, with its two revenue streams is able to pay the price the NFL asked for MNF and still turn a profit, whereas ABC loses money every year on football. On the one hand, we can see this as no more than the natural evolution of the marketplace. The age of broadcast dominance is over; we can probably predict a time when broadcast goes the way of the dinosaur except for local networks and PBS. Still, there are a lot of households out there without cable, and not all cable-equipped homes get ESPN. This automatically cuts out 17 million viewers.

As silly as it may seem, this is one of the few cultural institutions that America has as a nation that is universal regardless of sub-culture, race, ethnicity, age, sex or anything else. That's not to say that it has equal demographics in all categories, but MNF is more egalitarian than regular Sunday football. It's a sad loss; it would be a lot like us giving up a national holiday and only having devotees of a particular religion celebrate it. I mean, take both Christmas and Easter. Lots of people don't celebrate those as religious holidays, they celebrate them secularly. There's nothing wrong with that, it brings us all closer together and gives us all shared experiences, something Americans are particularly lacking in. I believe Monday Night Football had the same effect, and that as a cable program it no longer will. Sure, in the grand scheme of things it's not like losing a family member, but the things that give us good memories are important too, and MNF was one of those things.