In 1996, Disney purchased ABC for $19 billion and assumed control of ESPN. ABC and ESPN were kings of airing sports programs from various auto racing leagues, NFL, MLB, College Football, NBA, and NHL. For the longest time before cable, people watched sports programs on national broadcast stations such as ABC, NBC, and CBS. Fox later became a national broadcast channel in 1986.
As the years have gone by, Disney slowly began to move sports programs over to ESPN such as Monday Night Football and showing fewer sports programs on ABC. This eventually lead to the end of the famous “ABC Wide World Of Sports”.
Then Disney re-branded it as “ESPN on ABC”. While Disney does show sporting events on ABC like College Football, NBA, 3 college football bowl games, and the Indy 500. They don’t show enough sports for ABC. If you are trying to bring the audience back to watch your sports coverage, you need to show more sports leagues on ABC. With the amount of people cutting cable and satellite altogether and going back to the antenna and going to internet television packages like PlayStation Vue, you need to divide the sports programming to both ABC and ESPN.
So in order to do this, Disney would re-negotiate the contracts of these leagues to move some of them to ABC like Monday Night Football, and some NCAA basketball games, add more NBA games to ABC, and get more racing organizations. The only racing league in that ABC airs 6 Indycar races, that’s it. Before with ABC combined with ESPN they used to air every single racing league from monster trucks, F1, NASCAR, Off Road Stadium Truck Racing and etc.
In order to get the racing fans back, you need to add more racing sports other then Indycar. So, what are some other exciting racing leagues out there that should be on ABC and ESPN? Well, I’ll show you what the programming could look like if Disney rearranged sports programming for ABC and ESPN. I’ll also put in what sports leagues should be on ABC and ESPN. Here we go starting with ABC.
To help bring back ABC Sports, Disney must move the following: Move Monday Night Football back to ABC along with the one wild card game. When they re-negotiate with the NCAA College Football on the Playoff and Bowl games, Disney would continue to air regular season college football games and what they should do is move the big bowl games back to ABC like the Cotton, Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, Orange and Peach bowls.
Also, they would air the National Championship game while also retaining the Capital One Bowl and Outback bowl. Disney would put more college football bowl games on ABC than it has right now for the last 10 years. Disney would continue with their NBA coverage by having a doubleheader Sunday and airing all of the NBA Finals. The WNBA would also be back on ABC and have more regular season games and finals air on ABC as well. Disney would also bring back college basketball to ABC.
The last time that a college basketball game was on ABC were Oklahoma vs Oklahoma State in 2009. This would help them compete with college basketball games that you see on national networks like Fox and CBS.
Disney would then bring back auto racing. All they currently have are 6 IndyCar races including the Indy 500. Other than that, they don’t have any other racing leagues airing on ABC. So, what Disney could do is sign a television contract at a cheap price because these racing organizations want more exposure and would bring more racing to the network.
ABC would keep IndyCar following by getting the Trans-Am Series which many years ago they aired on ESPN along with bringing back ARCA and splitting the Pirelli World Challenge schedule with ESPN air the second half season on ABC. Another sport they could add is the American Hockey League (AHL). The Triple-A of the NHL. Hockey was a huge stable for ABC and ESPN until 2004 when Disney broke off the deal when the NHL went on strike and lost the 04-05 season. Since then, ESPN has aired international games like the KHL and World Cup of Hockey. The AHL would be a nice addition to ABC.
Disney could also pursue getting back the PGA Tour. ABC used to air the PGA Tour from 1962-2009. Golf is still a popular sport and NBC and CBS have done a nice job with the coverage of the PGA Tour. Disney could also move the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to ABC. Another move Disney could make is moving some of the Major League Soccer games to ABC and airing the full season of MLB Sunday Night Baseball. This would truly bring back the “ABC Wide World Of Sports”.
ABC Sports
Football:
NFL Monday Night Football
NFL Wild Card Game
NCAA College Football
Outback Bowl
Peach Bowl
Capital One Bowl
Citrus Bowl
Rose Bowl
Cotton Bowl
Sugar Bowl
Fiesta Bowl
Orange Bowl
CFB National Playoff
Basketball:
NBA Sunday Double Header
NBA Finals
WNBA
WNBA Finals
NCAAB:
NCAA Men’s Basketball
Hockey:
American Hockey League (AHL)
Racing:
Indycar Series
Trans-Am Racing Series
ARCA
Pirelli World Challenge
Golf:
PGA Tour
MLB:
Sunday Night Baseball
Soccer:
Major League Soccer (MLS)
Tennis:
Wimbledon
Now we turn our attention to ESPN, “The World Wide Leader In Sports”. Lately, ESPN hasn’t been known as that for quite some time. Fox, CBS, and NBC have picked apart ESPN for sports coverage and also paying more to air those games.
Disney should consider cutting some of the college football bowl games, more like the lower-tier bowls like the New Orleans Bowl, Dollar General bowl, and air 10 bowl games on ESPN. These bowl games like the Music City bowl tend to put up the best games on television. Disney should expand its coverage of the CFL then what they are now. The CFL is slowly becoming a popular league here in America. Disney would also continue to air the Arena Football League.
ESPN would also air the American Hockey League (AHL) regular season and playoff games. Heck, bring back the famous hockey theme to go with it. The network would also continue to air MLB Monday and Wednesday Night Baseball, NBA with their Wednesday and Friday night games, and NCAA Men’s and Women’s basketball games along with NCAA hockey, baseball, softball, volleyball, etc. Also, ESPN could air both the PGA and LPGA tours. ESPN does air early round coverage of “The Masters” but does not air the final rounds. ESPN would also continue to air MLS games along with ABC Sports, splitting the games for both networks.
The network could also air the United Soccer League (USL) games on the ESPN networks. Another league that ESPN could go after is Lacrosse. They could air both Major League Lacrosse and National Lacrosse League games.
The last coverage ESPN could air is auto racing. Racing organizations like Pirelli World Challenge, TORC Off-Road Racing, IHRA drag racing, and Monster Trucks. IHRA and Monster Trucks used to air on ESPN in the late 80’s early 90’s as part of “ESPN Speedworld” and this would be great to bring back Speedworld for the motorsports coverage. With adding these leagues like the AHL, TORC, IHRA, PGA, etc. It would help ESPN regain its identity as “The World Wide Leader In Sports”. Here is what could be ESPN coverage.
ESPN
Football:
Canadian Football League (CFL)
Arena Football League (AFL)
NCAA College Football
Russell Athletic Bowl
TaxSlayer Bowl
Las Vegas Bowl
Music City Bowl
Independence Bowl
Hawaii Bowl
Holiday Bowl
Alamo Bowl
Bahamas Bowl
Military Bowl
Hockey:
American Hockey League (AHL)
Golf:
PGA Tour
LPGA Tour
MLB:
Monday Night Baseball
Wednesday Night Baseball
NBA:
NBA Wednesday Night
NBA Friday Night
WNBA
NCAAB:
NCAA Men’s Basketball
NCAA Women’s Basketball
Racing:
Monster Trucks
IHRA
TORC Off-Road Racing Series
Pirelli World Challenge
NCAA:
NCAA Baseball
NCAA Softball
NCAA Hockey
Lacrosse:
National Lacrosse League
Major League Lacrosse
Soccer:
Major League Soccer (MLS)
United Soccer League (USL)
If Disney were to make these moves to help its sports coverage overall, it will rebound and reinvent itself. The sports audience would appreciate Disney making these moves so they can watch more sports on an antenna than on cable or satellite.
If the sports audience have an antenna and an internet television package like PlayStation Vue or if they still have cable or satellite, they get to watch all the sports they want with WatchESPN. By the way, all the sports coverage provided by ABC Sports and ESPN would air all on WatchESPN.
How would you make ABC and ESPN relevant again? Leave a comment below.
