NBC already had the season opener with Peyton Manning and Denver taking on Baltimore, the defending Super Bowl champs. On Nov. 24, it has Manning meeting his old rival, Tom Brady, in a game at New England.
However, the biggie is on Sunday. Manning returns to Indianapolis for the first time to face the Colts and its ungrateful owner. Jim Irsay apparently forgot that without No. 18, he doesn’t get that shiny new stadium in downtown Indy.
Yes, it is quite the bounty for NBC. The ratings should be huge for Sunday’s game, even with a possible Game 7 in the Boston-Detroit series.
Indeed, the NFL, which always scripts a strong Sunday night schedule, has been exceedingly good to NBC this year. It gave NBC arguably three of the four top games on Denver’s schedule.
CBS did get the Manning Bowl in week 2 with Peyton beating down his brother, Eli, in New York. And it has the two Denver-Kansas City games, which now have much greater significance than anticipated at the beginning of the season.
However, CBS, which has the AFC package, can’t be overly pleased with NBC landing Denver’s prime AFC’s games. The NFL could have tabbed one of Denver’s NFC’s games, which air on Fox, for a Sunday night.
And ESPN? Clearly, the network isn’t happy. Its only shot at the older Manning brother was a Denver-Oakland game in Week 3, a predictable rout that was at Denver, no less.
Mike Tirico wasn’t pleased to be calling a Raider game on a Monday. Last week, in an interview with The Mighty 1090 in San Diego, he voiced his displeasure.
“On Monday night, you deserve to see teams that are good, and the Raiders have not been good for a decade,” Tirico said. “I don’t think that best serves the customer, the NFL fan. You get Peyton Manning. That’s great. You want to see him against a quality opponent in one of his five or six primetime games as opposed to a team like the Raiders, coming off a bad season in a perpetual rebuild….I don’t think the Raiders are a team that America needs to see in primetime on national TV.”
It doesn’t get much better for Tirico and Jon Gruden this week. ESPN has the younger brother for Giants-Vikings on Monday night. Not quite the same. What looked like a decent match-up at the beginning of the season now is a dud; the teams have a combined 1-10 record. You only can generate so much hype for Josh Freeman’s Vikings debut.
Even if the Giants-Vikings were a good game, it isn’t on par with Peyton returning to Indy.
I’ve been told these things have a way evening out over time. There’s also the element of the luck of the draw. With the schedule being released in April, some games turn out better or worse depending on how teams fare during the season.
However, there was little doubt that NBC’s three Denver games would be huge. If it is indeed luck of the draw, then the network was dealt three aces.
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Earlier this week, NBC did a teleconference for the big game. Note, it occurred before Irsay made his ridiculous statements.
Here are the excerpts.
Tony Dungy on Manning: “I never thought I would see him in a different uniform and certainly wouldn’t think he would be coming back playing maybe the best football of his career — undefeated and putting up such gaudy numbers. But it’s going to be an emotional night, a fun night and a night where we’re going to see great quarterbacking I think on both sides of the field.”
Cris Collinsworth on Luck: “There’s going to be a great tribute [to Peyton Manning], but there’s also going to be a great passing of the torch. Andrew Luck, if you watched him play at all, you know what a fantastic player he is — his mobility, his brainpower, his ability to do so many other things that Peyton did early in his career, and arguably even at a better level.”
Rodney Harrison on Manning: “He is truly the best quarterback that I’ve faced in my career and I’ve had the privilege of going against so many great Hall of Fame quarterbacks. But Peyton Manning is something special. You can’t game plan around Peyton Manning. You just kind of hold your breath, try to do a few things right and hopefully you don’t get beat. Just to see the type of football that he’s playing at this stage of his career is absolutely amazing.”