Sep 8, 2023; Flushing, NY, USA; Carlos Alcaraz of Spain reacts after winning a point against Daniil Medvedev in a men’s singles semifinal on day twelve of the 2023 U.S. Open tennis tournament at USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center. Mandatory Credit: Danielle Parhizkaran-USA TODAY Sports
DisneyESPNTennisBy Ben Koo on

The trend of sporting events moving from ESPN to ABC may include another notable event.

While ESPN would not confirm, a few sharp sports media aficionados may have spotted a tell that the 2024 US Open Men’s Final is moving from its traditional Sunday afternoon broadcast slot on ESPN to ABC.

How was this discerned?

As Morgan Wick and others noted, the WNBA’s schedule release includes ESPN airing a game on September 8th at 4 p.m. ET, as seen below.

4 p.m. Sunday has long been when the US Open’s Men’s Championship takes place. ESPN has had the US Open exclusively since 2015 and has always slotted the Men’s Championship onto ESPN in this late afternoon and early evening window. You can see below the last two years, ESPN has carved out 4-7 p.m. for the Men’s Championship.

2023

2022

 

With the WNBA schedule release, the Men’s Final will not be on ESPN.  It would be pretty unthinkable for the Men’s Final to move to ESPN2, so you really only have two possibilities:

  • The Men’s Championship could move to a different time slot, most likely later in the day and after the WNBA game. While this is certainly possible, keep in mind ESPN has Sunday Night Baseball airing at 7 p.m. Displacing that towards the end of the season seems unlikely and something MLB would not appreciate.
  • The other possibility is that the Men’s Championship moves to ABC, which jibes with the prevailing trend of Disney/ESPN trickling more and more sports content to ABC.

Giving further credence to this theory is that, last year, the US Open DID get one slot on ABC earlier in the tournament (a Sunday afternoon the week before the start of the NFL season).

It’s not hard to imagine this experiment performed well and the wheels were put in motion for the Men’s Final to be moved over in a continuation of a trend we’ve seen play out the last few years (and seems to be picking up some more pace of late). Earlier this month, the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship debuted on ABC after being on ESPN for a long time. The CFP Championship is moving from ESPN to ABC. ABC has found its way back into the Super Bowl rotation as well.

While ABC did air prominent college football and NBA games for years, it was largely uninvolved in other events as Disney prioritized building up the juggernaut that is ESPN. Major events were used as a protective moat that would force cable and satellite providers to pay whatever was demanded to distribute the channel. But as the cable bubble has popped, that dynamic has changed. ABC’s wider distribution, the promise of higher carriage fees for ABC affiliates, and larger lead-in audiences for news and primetime programming have led Disney to start peeling off more and more events from ESPN and towards ABC.

This transition hasn’t been smooth though as ABC is now well behind their broadcast network peers with their sports strategy, which was noted during the Women’s NCAA Championship by Sports Media Watch.

ABC’s network and affiliates need to work better together, but it’s not hard to look at ESPN’s extensive live rights portfolio, coupled with what is airing or planned for ABC, and see a very clear path for ABC to reassert itself as a leading sports broadcast network. The US Open Men’s Championship is just another small step in that direction.

H/T Morgan Wick

About Ben Koo

Owner and editor of @AwfulAnnouncing. Recovering Silicon Valley startup guy. Fan of Buckeyes, A's, dogs, naps, tacos. and the old AOL dialup sounds

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