Chris “Mad Dog” Russo isn’t buying what the NFL is selling in terms of streaming.
The well-known sports talker is still enraged weeks later about the NFL’s decision to air the Chiefs-Dolphins wild-card round playoff game on the NBCUniversal-run platform, Peacock.
Russo has not been alone in his dismay over the NFL’s decision to broadcast a playoff game exclusively on the streaming service, but he has been very vocal about it.
And that included on Wednesday during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s “First Take.”
“The answers that they give you, ‘Well, our younger audience; we all have sorts of surveys that indicate that they’re going to streaming. And the Dolphins-Chiefs game this year, the younger audience attendance was superb, so essentially, we also have to go to streaming for our business model.’ Now, hold on,” Russo started out saying during his “What are You Mad About” segment.
“What are we, an idiot? I got younger kids; they stream. But they’re sports fans; you think they couldn’t find the game on NBC, CBS, Fox, or [ESPN] if the game is there? Ah, come on, it’s the football playoffs! They had 23 million for the Chiefs-Dolphins game. The next night — with the Lions against the Rams on NBC — they had 38 million. So, the idea that they’re doing the younger audience a tremendous service by showing a game in the postseason on streaming is a bunch of freaking nonsense.
“They did it because the NBC people gave them $110 million for the one stupid game. So, all the owners split the $55 million, and they make a fortune.”
Goodell defended the streaming push earlier in the week when he addressed a select group of reporters in Las Vegas ahead of Super Bowl 2024, claiming that the younger audience is watching things on those platforms, and that the NFL has to “fish where the fish are.”
“This isn’t about little Timmy Russo, little Colin Russo, little Kiera Russo — this is about making money,” Russo continued to rant. “And next year, another postseason game is on Peacock, and their answer is, ‘Well, our young [fans] they stream.’ Nonsense! It’s NFL playoff football. 110 million people are gonna watch the Super Bowl — and it’s not being streamed!”
Russo can sleep a little bit easier knowing that Goodell has said that the Super Bowl would never be a streaming-only broadcast “in my time.”
Goodell’s contract runs until 2027, which means there are at least three more Super Bowls that the former WFAN star won’t have to figure out how to pull up Peacock on his TV to watch the big game.
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