Screwed By The Network / Sports

ESPN examples go here

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• In 1991, NBC broke away from the NHL All-Star Game (from 1990-1994, NBC broadcast the All-Star Game, which was the only time that the NHL was nationally broadcast on over-the-air television in the United States outside of ESPN's paid programming on ABC during the 1992-93 and 1993-94 seasons) in favor of a press conference from the Pentagon regarding the Gulf War (the network was doing this also during weekdays, preempting Days of Our Lives too.). The previously unaired third period was rebroadcast on SportsChannel America. Unfortunately, SportsChannel America (who replaced ESPN as the NHL's primary cable broadcasting outlet in the United States in the 1988-89 season and continued through the 1991-92 season) was for all intents and purposes, a premium outlet that was available to about 1/4 less of the homes that ESPN was in at the time.
  • NBC would again interrupt the NHL in 2007, when a decisive Ottawa Senators-Buffalo Sabres game on the conference finals went to overtime and had to be cut for the pre-race coverage of the Preakness Stakes, meaning only those with Versus (now known as NBC Sports Network,) could see Ottawa eventually finish off the series.
• Versus/NBC Sports Network at times had problems carrying NHL games, but mainly due to cable company quirks. In 2005 a quadruple overtime game was cut off in some markets after 3am ET when infomercials provided by the cable provider kicked in; after that the network disallowed infomercial substitution in the future (along with most other networks). A May 2013 game airing on CNBC went unseen in the St. Louis market due to a switching problem. Other than that though, NBC and the NBC Sports Network had been downright kind compared to ESPN with the NHL.
  • 2018 had one moment that made fans outraged when scheduling conflicts brought two playoff games to the Golf Channel, of all places.
  • Then came the end of their contract in 2021. Not only did NBC decide to air the first two games of the Stanley Cup Finals on NBCSN as opposed to the main network (usually, NBC gets game one while games two and three go to NBCSN, with the rest going back to NBC beginning with the fourth game), but they also simulcast the games on Peacock, resulting in many a viewer being siphoned away as Nielsen doesn't register ratings from Peacock. Adding salt to the wound, NBC declined to produce a telecast of the NHL Draft for next season (which was going to be the first covered by new partners ESPN^note Part two! and TBS/TNT anyway) with the excuse being that it was too close to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics^note Held in 2021 after being postponed thanks to COVID. This meant that ESPN2 (as well as Sportsnet in Canada, as the draft was a virtual event due to COVID-19) had to take coverage from NHL Network, as ESPN hadn't fully assembled its hockey coverage team and studio by then.
• IndyCar has had a similar path when Versus picked up the load for most (but not all) of its events starting in 2009: ratings have been substantially lower due to Versus simply not being a well-known network (plus the Executive Meddling by the channel's owner, Comcast) even though viewers agree that Versus gives much better treatment to the series as opposed to ABC/ESPN(2); however, the ABC-aired races in 2009 (the Indy 500 and several other summer events) hadn't had as drastic a dropoff as the cable races and started to put a bit more effort into the broadcasts. Of course, a lot of this stems from Tony George's own Executive Meddling that caused the American open-wheel racing split from 1996-2008.
  • With Versus rebranding as NBC Sports Network and becoming more established, the series benefited from better exposure outside of the races aired on ABC. In 2019, NBC took the package formerly held by ABC to give it exclusive coverage of the entire schedule, and it has thankfully proven that NBCSN and NBC can handle both IndyCar and NASCAR without alienating either fanbase too badly, to the point the fandom was relieved the 500 (which was literally the only IndyCar event ABC/ESPN gave any care about) also went to the Peacock.
• The Arena Football League may be another one screwed by NBC. After the network lost its NFL games to CBS in 1997 and the 2001 XFL debacle, NBC signed what looked like a good deal with the Arena League at the time (both sides would split ad revenues 50/50 instead of one side getting rights fees). NBC even convinced the league to move up its normal Summer schedule, saying the league could be promoted better if it started the week after the Super Bowl. But when the NFL came calling back to NBC in 2006, the network promptly forgot about the Arena League, leaving it to play at a time of year where it had to compete with the NBA, NHL, and college basketball for viewership (and arena bookings). After returning to ESPN, the league suspended operations for the 2009, reviving in 2010 with half the previous teams choosing not to come back with it (the league slots were filled by teams coming from AF2, a secondary arena football league). As of 2018, it was on CBS Sports Network, and had shrunk to four teams (owned by a total of two people), all in the Northeast (with the Arena Bowl championship being won by a 2-10 Washington squad).
  • The AFL would expand to six teams in 2019, but would fold (again) after the season, largely due to a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed by its insurance carrier.
• Major League Baseball screwed themselves with their short-sighted television deals back in the early 1990s:
  • First and foremost, MLB signed a $1.2 billion (approximately) deal with CBS for the next four years. They replaced ABC (who had covered Monday and later Thursday night baseball games consecutively since 1976) and NBC (who had covered Major League Baseball in some shape or form since 1947) as the national, broadcast TV outlet for Major League Baseball. Once CBS came into the picture, Major League Baseball, under the leadership of then outgoing Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, proceeded to systematically destroy the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week (a longtime institution on NBC). CBS became notorious for their sporadic regular season scheduling (often airing golf events on weeks in place of baseball). MLB's logic was that since a myriad of games were going to air on ESPN, the concept of a nationally televised Game of the Week was growing obsolete. When the dust was settled, CBS (who by the end of 1993, had also lost the National Football League to Fox, the National Basketball Association to NBC, and college football) lost at least half a billion dollars off of that baseball deal. Despite all of this, CBS was willing to renew their contract with MLB for two more years. Unfortunately, mid-way through the 1993 season, MLB was already working on a revenue sharing joint-venture with ABC and NBC called "The Baseball Network".
  • The Baseball Network was even worse than what CBS had to offer (with ABC and NBC each covering six weeks of regionalized coverage following the All-Star Break). Without going into full blown detail (check the Wikipedia article on The Baseball Network to get a proper perspective) here, all that you need to know first and foremost, is that the first two rounds of the playoffs were regionally televised simultaneously. Perhaps the one positive thing to come out of the 1994-95 baseball strike, was that it hastened the premature demise of The Baseball Network (which was supposed to run through the 1999 season). Shortly afterwards, both ABC and NBC (who had to split coverage of the 1995 World Series) publicly vowed to have nothing more to do with Major League Baseball for at least the remainder of the 20th century. NBC however reluctantly (they could only be bothered to show postseason games and the All-Star Game in even numbered years) reconsidered and wound up sharing the broadcast rights with Fox through the end of the 2000 season.
  • Reluctantly is putting it mildly. When the 1997 World Series ended up being played by two small-market teams (Florida and Cleveland), NBC's West Coast head Don Ohlmeyer publicly declared that he hoped it would end in a four-game sweep, since even a fifth game would mean pre-empting his precious "Must See TV" Thursday lineup. (He didn't get his wish; the Series went the full seven games.)^note He kind of had a point, even the highest rated World Series games would be lucky to get half the viewers Friends, Seinfeld, and ER pulled in.
• In Australia, the Seven Network's screwing of the National Soccer League led to the competition eventually collapsing in 2004. The channel bought the rights for a pay television sports channel, but after they lost the rights to Australian Rules Football, they shut down the pay tv channel, and never bothered airing the soccer in any regular fashion, and never live. A highlight package after midnight on Wednesdays was the best the coverage got at times. A network slogan at the time was parodied with the phrase "Nobody screws soccer like Seven."
  • It is actually worse than simply 'shutting down the channel', the NSL was deliberately screwed over by the network. In a subsequent lawsuit over the failure of the pay tv channel, the network executives were exposed via emails showing that they were angry that the managers of Australian Rules Football were not giving them enough credit for buying the National Soccer League rights then burying the sport.
• One HD's coverage of The National Basketball League games fell into this when it was announcing in October 2011 that all NBL games aired on One HD would be delayed which angered fans. One HD the following month announced that all NBL games would be delayed 'even further to 1:00 a.m.-2:00 a.m., which pissed off more fans. NBL fans are now trying to boycott the channel.
• Formula One for years had prime spots on the BBC since it's well-loved in the UK, showing all the races and qualifying since the start (excusing the brief time it went to ITV (which meant there were adverts during the races)). From 2012 to 2015, only half of the races were shown on the BBC whilst Sky Sports (a channel one would have to pay a lot for, including their television license) will show all the races and the qualifying. Within the first month a Sports site did a poll to find out people's reaction. Fifty per cent said they refused to watch the races on Sky. In 2016, Channel 4 bought the free-to-air rights, again only airing half of the number of races. And in 2019, Formula One almost disappeared from terrestrial television as Sky Sports bought the rights to every race, leaving Channel 4 to broadcast only highlights of each race and live coverage of the British Grand Prix.
  • In Brazil, Rede Globo was adamant in broadcasting every race for decades, with few exceptions (including broadcasts interrupted by The World Cup, the Olympic Games... and a visit by Pope Benedict XVI). Then starting in The New '10s many ended up screwed - races not shown or interrupted between 1981 and 2007: 11; between 2011 and 2019: 22 - specially ones in North America that thus have their starting times overlapping with games of the Brazilian Football Championship (a particularly bad example was in a late race in 2012, when the champion had already been set in the field but not on the track, and soccer still took priority over the cars) and thus were taken over by a sister satellite TV channel (which also started to get the qualifiers), though in 2013 a race wasn't shown because of... the visit of Pope Francis! The decline got worse in 2018, coinciding with the country not having any drivers, as Globo opted to stop showing the award podiums and didn't air five races - three lost to the World Cup (only broadcast online), one to the national championship, and one to election coverage. 2019 lost three races, and even if 2020 only had one missed race - because COVID ensured the F1 season itself was troubled - it was still the last under Globo. Bandeirantes returned to the fold after 41 years, and have since done a good job of showing the races in full.
• Professional Bull Riders got screwed by multiple networks: Originally, full events were shown on Versus, but new licensing deals meant events are now shown on NBC, NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus), CBS, and the PBR's own streaming online broadcast site. Often a single event will be divided up between two of these outlets, making it extremely difficult for fans to keep track of. And in football season, pray CBS doesn't have a game on in your market, or else PBR is preempted.
• The Heidi Game: On November 17, 1968, NBC broke away from the final minutes of a much-anticipated American Football League match up between the Oakland Raiders and New York Jets to air the film adaption of the book Heidi, causing most fans to miss the Raiders' Miracle Rally.^note West Coast fans saw the ending in its entirety, while everyone else was notified via a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen that was seen during Heidi. Ever since, it's been network policy not to break away from a live sporting event. At least until 2007.
• Quite a few old guard racing fans feel North Wilkesboro Speedway, the very first NASCAR-sanctioned racetrack, was screwed out of both its NASCAR Cup race dates in 1995. Bruton Smith was building a big new speedway in North Texas, but NASCAR was adamantly refusing to add races to the schedule to accommodate the new track. So he bought up the share of Wilkesboro owned by the Combs family, supposedly claiming he planned to keep the place open by expanding its capacity and using it for a primetime mid-week race while only giving up its spring date to Texas. But his purchase drove the Staley family (whose patriarch and track founder, Enoch, had died that May) to sell their share in the track to New Hampshire Speedway owner Bob Bahre. With that, New Hampshire got Willkesboro’s fall race while Texas got its spring date beginning in 1997. However, others associated with the sport have justified the move, citing Wilkesboro’s lack of modern facilities (the press box still used rotary phones, according to journalists) and the high risk-low reward of racing there given its small purse and toll the short track put on race cars.
  • The track underwent renovations in the early-2020s, and in 2023, North Wilkesboro Speedway hosted that season's edition of the NASCAR All-Star Race (as well as a Craftsman Truck Series event) in honor of NASCAR's 75th anniversary season. Further renovations are planned, with the possibility of future NASCAR races afterward.
• Not a sports example technically, but NBC shot down Poker After Dark, a late-night broadcast of poker games sponsored by online casino company Full Tilt Poker, without any warning or hints. While some pin the show's cancellation on declining ratings, fueled in part by affiliates refusing to broadcast the program over their anti-gambling policies, the real culprit was when sponsors Full Tilt were caught in a federal criminal investigation over charges of money laundering and setting up Ponzi schemes on its customers. NBC, desperate to clean their hands off the matter, promptly replaced Poker After Dark with a repeat of the fourth hour of Today, not telling the press about the matter or anyone who worked on the telecasts that they would be dropped by the network. Sister cable network NBC Sports Network began airing reruns of Poker After Dark following its re-branding from Versus in 2012, eventually broadcast the unaired episodes of the show's final season, and continued airing repeats of the series on midnights for a couple of years before it disappeared forever.
• Televisión Española was showing Severiano Ballesteros' run in the US Masters when it suddenly decided to cut off the signal to a horse race... which lasted through Ballesteros winning the tournament.
• The National Football League's contracts with its media partners can cause networks to postpone or pre-empt programming of their own in order to air football games in case of postponements or emergencies from the NFL. For instance, NBC originally scheduled an episode of the Dateline news program about the Ross Harris trial for January 15, 2017, but two days before airing, an ice storm in Kansas City caused the delay of a Kansas City-Pittsburgh Steelers game that day to prime-time. Because of NBC's contractual obligations to the NFL (though NBC certainly wasn't turning down a high-rated playoff game airing in primetime rather than in the afternoon), it had to air a couple weeks later (it aired the same night on the West Coast, but mainly as primetime filler).
• Many fans and players on the Houston Astros feel MLB Commissioner Bud Selig screwed them out of a chance to make the postseason in 2008. Hurricane Ike displaced an Astros home series with the Chicago Cubs; rather than postpone the games or relocate them to a closer venue (the Texas Rangers' park, just 240 miles from Houston, was available at the time), Selig ordered 2 of the 3 games (the third would be played in Houston at season's end if it was needed to determine a playoff spot) to be played as scheduled but moved to Miller Park in Milwaukee (a team he formerly owned), just 90 miles from Chicago - essentially turning it into a road series for the Astros even though they were still officially the home team (in times where the Brewers aren't doing good and the Cubs are doing well, Miller Park takes on the derisive nickname "Wrigley Field North" as Cubs fans take advantage of cheaper Milwaukee tickets to see their team; without many Brewers fans to deal with, Cubs fans easily filled the stadium). The Astros lost both games (including being no-hit by Carlos Zambrano in the first game) and proceeded to drop out of the playoff hunt. Numerous players finished the year wearing shirts under their jerseys that read "Bud Screwed Our Season."
• In 2018, Fox Sports elected not to renew its broadcasting contract with Ultimate Fighting Championship, set to expire at the end of the year, in favor of WWE SmackDown beginning in October 2019. Although a common reasoning for the snub was that the UFC was asking for more money Fox that wasn't willing to pay, the real culprit was 21st Century Fox undergoing a major shakeup as it was in the midst of selling the majority of its entertainment properties to Disney at the time, and deciding to focus more on live programming, news, and sports. A former Fox staffer told The Hollywood Reporter that Fox simply walked away from UFC, believing that there was no way it could market UFC due to its more adult-oriented fanbase, whereas WWE was geared more towards family audiences^note Which is kind of funny when a demographic breakdown of the Neilson ratings show that WWE's audience is mainly composed of men in their 50s, though wrestling is able to draw at least some Periphery Demographic, something UFC has never been able to do. Ironically, the Disney-owned ESPN would subsequently pick up the broadcast rights to help bolster its newly-launched streaming platform ESPN+.
  • Fox would later simply walk away from WWE, thanks to low ratings (relatively speaking) and the lower ad rates that wrestling usually brings in on account of the cultural stigma that wrestling fans are uneducated and have low incomes. SmackDown Live will return to the USA Network in 2024.
• As referenced in the above entry, in 2017, Disney began the process of buying 21st Century Fox. The sale didn't include Fox Sports itself (which remained with the spun-off Fox), but the sale did include the Fox Sports regional networks (formerly known as Fox Sports Net, and home to the local broadcasting rights for 15 of the 30 MLB teams, 16 of the 30 NBA teams, and 12 of the then-31 NHL teams). Because Disney already owns ESPN, the Department of Justice was afraid of a monopoly, so they mandated the sale of the networks within 90 days of the sale closing. After several companies were rumored to be interested in all or part of the group, the networks were sold to controversial local station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group, who was looking to expand their sports properties to complement their Stadium service and Tennis Channel. Almost immediately, without the clout of Fox's cable networks such as Fox News, FX, and National Geographic, TV providers such as Dish Network and nearly all OTT streaming providers like Hulu Live and YouTube TV started dropping the networks when their last carriage deals negotiated with Fox expired. The providers maintain that Sinclair was asking too much for the networks, and they weren't able to successfully package the RSNs with their local stations and middling subchannel networks. The result is that half of the country with satellite, along with all streaming services except the DirecTV adjacent AT&T Now, and most small cable companies were shut out of watching their local teams. The rub with this is that any league-owned streaming option blacks out in-market games to protect contracts with local broadcasters. When Sinclair partnered with Bally's casinos for naming rights for the networks and announced their re-brand of the networks...the reaction of many was indifference and instead asking when their local teams would be back on their TV provider.
  • Things have only gotten worse for Sinclair from there — in addition to a major cyberattack crippling the company in fall 2021 (the effects of which are detailed in the Real World folder on We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties, though ironically, the Bally RSNs weren't affected by this) and the sale of their pro wrestling division, Ring of Honor, in 2022, it became clear that Sinclair had only purchased the RSNs from Disney because they wanted to buy something after their own hubris led to the collapse of a deal to buy Tribune Media a couple years prior. By this point, the RSN industry simply wasn't what it used to be — soaring rights fees to pro teams, a lack of viewership for programming outside of live events (something that had bedeviled Fox since they formed FSN back in 1996), and the rise of streaming (with many streaming services refusing to carry RSNs because of the insane fees charged to pay the teams, which is also a key reason why cable has become so expensive) have added up into a rapidly-collapsing market; Disney in effect had found Sinclair to be a willing sucker. Ergo, Sinclair has struggled with paying off the debt load as the deal they made to buy the networks was highly-leveraged. Ultimately, the cracks began to show in March 2023, when Diamond Sports (the holding company Sinclair owns the Bally Sports networks through) missed a $140 million interest payment, then declared bankruptcy 30 days later. As a result, Sinclair was unable to pay several teams carried by their networks, primarily MLB teams, forcing the league to begin creating contingency plans; the San Diego Padres ultimately left when Diamond missed a payment to keep the Padres on Bally Sports San Diego (for now the games can be seen blackout-free via the MLB.TV streaming service). Even worse, Diamond has also become entangled in legal maneuvering between them and the Phoenix Suns NBA team when the latter opted to sign a deal with Gray Television to air their games OTA, and worsening the ordeal, a short time later, the Arizona Diamondbacks also left Bally Sports Arizona following another missed payment (like the Padres, their games can currently be seen blackout-free via the MLB.TV streaming service). The resulting money drain on Sinclair has resulted in several of their small-market stations being forced to either cutback or completely scrap their (often low-rated) local news departments. The question isn't how Diamond will completely collapse, it's when; Arizona ended up becoming the first Diamond network to cease operations entirely following the loss of the Suns and Diamondbacks; the Arizona Coyotes, unlike the other teams, were willing to hang around, but Diamond decided to close shop altogether given the Coyotes' own woes (which date back long before the Diamond fiasco and which would ultimately lead to plans for them to relocate to Salt Lake City after the 2023-24 season), leaving them to follow the Suns' lead by signing a deal with Scripps Sports, the sports division of the E. W. Scripps Company, to run their games OTA.
• The UEFA Champions League's deal with TNT is an example of what happens when a gamble goes horribly wrong. When Turner Sports picked up the rights from Fox Sports, the hope was that it would draw more valuable sports properties to TNT, whose sole cash cow was the longtime NBA package (they had lost the NASCAR rights to NBC four years prior and was about to lose the PGA Championship Tour to ESPN) as their scripted programming was dropping dead left and right, and would bolster their upcoming B/R Live platform. Unfortunately, Turner decided to make a big bet by putting only four UEFA games on TNT while putting the rest on B/R Live's paid tier on the belief that it would drive faster downloads and subscriptions for the app. Unfortunately for them, ESPN+ launched around the same time with a stronger slate of sports (notably UFC) and the strong brand power of ESPN flocked people to that service instead. That, coupled with B/R Live's limited availability across platforms, resulted in the service getting utterly swamped on both viewership and subscription fronts. On top of that, the games TNT aired were derided for using phoned-in commentary from the UK team as opposed to their own, and fans were unwilling to pay for a service with a smaller variety of sports than ESPN+. The league, realizing how badly Turner screwed them over, signed a new contract with CBS while Turner was still airing games, that also included streaming components but saw most of their games aired on cable and over-the-air television like the Fox deal. The last straw, though, came when the season was on pause due to the COVID-19 Pandemic: just as the league was preparing for resumption of play, Turner informed them that they would exercise its opt-out clause in their contract as retaliation for the CBS deal. CBS ended up paying a massive discount for rights to the remainder of the season as the league was desperate to avoid getting blacked out entirely in the States for a year-and-a-half. Long story short, Turner screwed UEFA because they made a wrong bet at the wrong time and the UEFA didn't want to face four years of an American fanbase with limited access to games.
  • Just how badly did Turner screw up? When they snatched the broadcast rights to National Hockey League games from NBC, they carved out streaming/simulcast rights to HBO Max, a service with far more subscribers and availability than B/R Live, in addition to keeping the majority of games on cable, showing that they had at least learned their lesson from the UEFA debacle about not taking fans for granted. Turner eventually took the hint in 2021 and decided to integrate B/R Live into the main B/R interface as opposed to being its own separate service.
• During the COVID-19 Pandemic, starting with non-NFL teams entering their 2020-21 seasons, local television programs for many teams that aired on then-Fox Sports (now Bally Sports) programs have had their channels taken off of a majority of cable and general TV providers altogether. Making the decision even worse is the fact that for some people, these channels are the only way for some fans to even watch these programs altogether (at least in a legal manner). The result of the decision made by the Sinclair Broadcast Group removing these channels from many TV providers have led to immediate decline in viewership for fans trying to watch the teams they like.
• The CW's entrance into the sports broadcasting industry with LIV Golf was tainted by circumstance. Since the network's existing affiliation contracts only covered prime time (and E/I programming), the only CW affiliates actually obligated to run the games. On top of that, LIV Golf itself is funded mainly by the Private Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth agency, prompting accusations from the news media of sportswashing given the country's highly publicized human rights violations. This, along with pressure from the PGA Tour against the upstart competitor, led to issues getting affiliates on board; in the end, most CW affiliates agreed to carry the games through various agreements with the network, but a few, most notably those owned by CBS, Tegna, and Lilly, which refused, forcing the network to sign back-up deals with independent stations, those affiliated with MyNetworkTV, or digital subchannels that mostly carry programming from multicast networks like Antenna TV or Rewind TV.
  • And then came the jawdropping announcement that LIV and the PGA Tour were to merge; this announcement caught everyone off guard, including people working at both companies, the golfers, and even CBS. Suspicion that the PGA Tour higher ups had been more-or-less bribed by the Saudis to merge (especially as the announcement came as both LIV and the PGA Tour were still taking on each other in court) quickly began to surface. What this will mean for the CW's coverage — especially as US and other governmental bodies may block the deal — is currently unclear.