RadioOnFire.com - In a decision reached only one week ahead of the scheduled New Year's Eve nightcap, the NFL has announced that it will be scrapping the season's final Sunday Night Football game that was set to air on NBC at 8:30 pm on December 31.
“We felt that both from a competitive standpoint and from a fan perspective, the most fair thing to do is to schedule all Week 17 games in either the 1 pm or 4:25 pm windows,” NFL media-rights negotiator and broadcasting head Howard Katz has said about the move.
In essence, all Week 17 action will air via CBS and Fox, with seven games taking place during the 1 pm slot and the remaining games going down at 4:25 pm. There has been no word on how NBC will fill in the now-vacant spot, or whether the league has worked out a deal to compensate the network for its removal of the game.
It will be the first time in 40 years (1977) that the NFL regular season will not culminate with a primetime broadcast. Many suspect that with the league experiencing a 9% rating dip this season, the front office wanted to avoid an epic television failure.
Taking history into consideration, a broadcast taking place only hours before the ball drops in Times Square likely wouldn't fair well. The last time there was an NBC Sunday Night Football game on New Year's Eve was in 2006 when the Bears battled the Packers in what was thought at the time to be Brett Favre's final game. That game registered about a quarter fewer viewers than had been the average that season, with only 13.4 million tuning in.
Source: deadspin.com
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