Did anyone ever wonder why there are two NFL games on tonight when usually there is only one game on at night? What makes this night any different?(obligatory religious holiday reference)
It goes back to Hurricane Katrina and 2005. When the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast ( it actually made landfall in Mississippi but we won't get technical)and inundated New Orleans when the levies broke, it forced the Saints to find alternative locations to play that year, playing eight road games and their eight 'home games' in San Antonio, TX (3), Baton Rouge, LA (3) and East Rutherford, NJ (1). Week one, the Saints played on the road so it wasn't an issue but week two, the Saints had a home game scheduled against the Giants. Not a problem, just move it to the Meadowlands and NJ you say. Good suggestion but the Giants did and still do share a stadium with the other NY football team, the Jets who already had a home game scheduled for that Sunday ( Sept 18, 2005) in the Meadowlands. The alternative was to play the Saints-Giants game in the Meadowlands, the next day on Monday night. Monday Night Football traditionally started at 9 PM East Coast time and the powers that be didn't want the games to overlap so they decided the Giants-Saints game would start at 7 PM East Coast time and only overlap for an hour or so. ABC which had the rights to broadcast the games since the inception of MNF in the early 1970s broadcast the originally scheduled MNF Washington-Dallas game while the Saints Giants was broadcast elsewhere.(Someone may remember- I listened to the game on radio in Gulfport, MS). Normally the ratings on the East Coast dropped as the games got later on in the evening and often ended well past midnight ( or well after one am for the infamous Dolphins-Jets shootout in the 1980s)so the opportunity to broadcast a game at 7 pm and keep an audience watching football for five plus hours was appealing...and the Nielsen rating proved it, with great ratings.
When the league was organizing the schedule for 2006, they opted for a doubleheader on opening Monday night with an East Coast game, Minnesota vs Washington schedule to begin at 7 PM and a West Coast game San Diego ( now LA) Chargers vs Oakland (now LA, soon to Las Vegas) Raiders. Both games started early in their respective time zones so fans could get their fill of football without losing sleep.
And to paraphrase Paul Harvey, is the rest of the story as to why there are two football games on tonight. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm going form memory and some Wikipedia searches to fill in voids so there may be some factual inaccuracies but I believe they're minimal at most..
