PASADENA, Calif. -- A year after the folks at CBS were all but giddy over regaining a piece of the NFL television package, they've calmed down a bit. Now they're just very, very happy.
This despite the fact that their rating for the AFC portion of the regular-season package ended up 1 percent behind what NBC got during the 1997 season -- and the fact that the network didn't make any money on the NFL itself."We broke even on the NFL," said CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves. "We hit our numbers."
When CBS executives won the package, they maintained that they could avoid losing money on the billion-dollar, multiyear deal. And they maintained that the NFL would help them make money in other areas.
"We are extremely pleased with what the NFL did for our owned-and-operated stations, for our affiliates and also for the rest of the CBS schedule. I think we feel like a total network again because of that," Moonves said.
(Networks make far more money from their owned stations -- which, in CBS's case, includes KUTV-Ch. 2 in Utah -- than they do from network operation.)
And, at CBS, they are firmly convinced that the promotional platform offered by the NFL has helped the ratings of their prime-time schedule.
"Clearly, our young male demographic is up considerably on 11 of our prime-time programs," Moonves said. "I don't think there's any coincidence to that. I'd like to say it's because of brilliant programming, but we're up and NBC is down. I think the NFL certainly has helped that."
All of which boils down to the fact that, despite falling ratings, NFL team owners can count on enormous television rights fees for years to come.
MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL FALTERS: The AFC package on CBS was down only 1 percent, but ABC's "Monday Night Football" was off by more than 5 percent -- not a great return on an investment of more than a billion dollars the network made for a multiyear pact. But no one at the alphabet network is complaining too loudly.
For one thing, by moving the starting time up 40 minutes, ABC improved its ratings in the hour that used to be before the game by 137 percent. And network executives see the games themselves, rather than the package, as the problem.
"I actually think it's more to the point that the games were not as strong on Monday night as they were on Sunday night or on some of the afternoon games," said Patricia Fili-Krushel, president of the ABC television network. "I mean, the average spread of the NFL games was about 11 points and on 'Monday Night Football' it was closer to 16 1/2 points. The games were just not as competitive. It's the luck of the draw."
It's a point the Entertainment division executives echoed.
"The only disappointment, I really think, is in the lopsided aspect of so many of the games," said ABC Entertainment Chairman Stu Bloomberg.
"I mean, you knew what was going to happen by halftime, and I think that might have been a contributing factor," said ABC Entertainment President Jamie Tarses.
With a schedule set months before the season starts there's no guarantee ABC isn't going to get stuck with a bunch of blowouts again next season.