The NFL On Nickelodeon

Last night, the National Football League partnered with ViacomCBS, the parent company of both CBS and Nickelodeon, to broadcast the play-off game between the New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears. This was done on Nickelodeon as the idea was to produce a broadcast aimed exclusively at kids.

There was a trial run during last month’s Philadelphia Eagles-Green Bay Packers game in order to test the graphics, animation, and other technical details.

SpongeBob, Slime, and Googly Eyes, @NFLonCBS and @Nickelodeon will present the NFL like you’ve NEVER seen it before on Wild Card Weekend.

Details on the January 10 broadcast here: https://t.co/NK00FW2vsN pic.twitter.com/x3wf1dqaIk

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 15, 2020

The game’s broadcast crew consisted of Noah Eagle (the radio voice of the Los Angeles Clippers and son of longtime CBS play-by-play announcer Ian Eagle), NFL Today/NFL Network analyst Nate Burleson, Nickelodeon’s Gabrielle Nevaeh Green in the booth, and Green’s “All That” co-star Lex Lumpkin as the field reporter.

So…what did a hard-grizzled, crabby old man blogger think of this production?

On The Upside:

• Conceptually, this was a “home run” in terms of creating a vehicle for getting kids interested in football and explaining the game to them.
• The graphics were fun, and perfectly designed to keep kids’ attention.

• Imagine a football game without a single commercial selling me beer, a pick-up truck, or the carrying network’s bullshit news programming.
• An homage to Vin Scully who knew obscure facts about every player in the game. Aimed at kids, it was perfect to talk about which ice cream was a players’ favorite or which 300-pound lineman is afraid of the dark.
• Lex Lumpkin has a future as a sideline reporter. He’s not an idiot, he’s entertaining, and he does a pretty damn good impression of Barack Obama.
• The halftime promotion for SpongeBob Squarepants’ Kamp Koral was a nice break from the dueling idiocy of CBS’ Phil Simms, Boomer Esiason, and Bill “Lost 4 AFC Championship Games” Cowher.

On the Downside:

• Experienced football fans without kids who can’t take the pedestrian nature of normal announcers would positively hate the overly-elementary descriptions of everything.
• During the game, it was a bit too much of a commercial for shit like Young Sheldon.
• At first, they had issues with the graphics, namely the first-down lines kept fluctuating during play…but they figured it out.

The Bottom Line:

If you’re that guy who loves to talk about football in term like “coverage schemes” and “passing game concepts,” this broadcast was not for you. But then again, if you are one of those guys, or you have half you paycheck tied up in some sort of FanDuel/Draft Kings fantasy/gambling hook, you’re probably a jerk-off who nobody likes anyway.

For what it was intended to do, the overnight ratings points will determine to those in the know if this was a success or not. But on the conceptual level, every other major sports league needs to take a hard look at what the NFL did last night when it comes to attracting new young fans to the game.

After all, the hard-grizzled, crabby old man blogger found twice the number of “pros” than “cons” in this event. What does that tell you?

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