This Party Was Over a Long Time Ago

I've been meaning to write something about the end of Monday Night Football, but have had some trouble getting motivated. Which, really, says more about my relationship to the show than anything.

The show clearly has places in both TV and sports history, at least. It also has some unusual cultural cachet - a fair number of Americans heard about John Lennon's killing on MNF, and we all got to talk about race in America when Alvin Garrett was compared to a primate. But for as much of a football fan as I am, MNF was must sample TV rather than must watch.

Four reasons come to mind for this:

1. My home team, the New England Patriots, once went 13 years without a Monday night appearance. It's not like they were being snubbed - the team was legitimately awful, and the city father of Foxborough generally had a negative stance on Monday night games. But when your team goes that long without getting on air, and when that dry spell is during one's formative years, you can see where that might set a pattern of casual viewing.

2. Some teams got on MNF based on demographics rather than talent. There's been some awful football on Monday nights, thanks to the need to show a lousy team from a major media market. I wouldn't watch these teams on a Sunday afternoon; why would I lose sleep to watch them during the week?

3. The games started at 9 pm (actually later, as the coverage started at 9). That guarantees a finish time after midnight (and generally closer to 1 am than midnight), which I could do when I was a student. Not so much now when I have to get up and go to work. I could have recorded games, but why bother when you can get a solid condensed recap on Sports Center or the like?

4. I can now see new football games, between college and pro, pretty much every night of the week. If there's not a new game, I can probably find a game from last week being repeated, or catch an old one on ESPN Classic. This saturation made Monday night less of a requirement for getting one's pigskin fix.

As for the personalities, I never really had the problems with booth or sideline personnel that others had, outside of Lisa Guererro, who was awful (possibly even worse than Eric Dickerson, who was at least entertaining in a fish out of water kind of way). I enjoyed the Dennis Miller experiment as much as John Madden's sound effects, and recall Howard Cosell's bombast as well as Frank Gifford's dull but sonorous voice. Speaking of which, he did not compare well to Don Meredith. Dandy Don looked pretty good, although he appeared on the last episode via tape, while Frank was live. So to speak.

(Also speaking of Gifford, I will say that the period where he did intros and Chris Berman did stuff from the ESPN Zone restaurant was not good, either. At least they killed that off quick.)

I suppose the biggest argument against missing MNF is that there will still be Monday night football - just on ESPN. Like the vast majority of America, I have that channel. I just hope they start the games earlier.

As an American male I should feel more passionate about the end of Monday Night Football, but I don't.