This past September, the NFL & ESPN announced a contract extension valued at just under two billion dollars per year that will keep Monday Night Football on ESPN through the 2021 season. Included in the contract extension was the right for ESPN to televise several NFL-themed studio shows throughout the week.
As the 2011 NFL regular season enters the stretch drive, The Sports Business Daily came out with an article last week that those NFL-themed studio shows are not bringing in the viewers, with October viewership in the 3pm (CT) window dropping 38% from the same time last year while on ESPN2, NFL-themed studio shows in the 5pm (CT) window saw a decrease of 45% in October in the same 5pm (CT) window last year.
You can read the entire article at the link above, but several staff writers for The Sports Business Daily all agree that the NFL-themed studio programming on ESPN has hit the saturation point.
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