STORRS, Conn. - ESPN has bought the rights to ABC's Dancing with the Stars and will immediately begin broadcasting it in place of Monday Night Football, says ESPN president George Bodenheimer.
Some football purists may be stunned, said Bodenheimer, but ESPN is just continuing in its programmatic approach of giving fans what they want -- not what they say they want. Using proprietary data licensed from TIVO, Bodenheimer said ESPN was able to see what people actually watch during a football game, and thus what they want to see.
"We didn't believe it until we saw it, but the data are clear. Examining the replay, fast-forward, skip and slo-mo patterns, it is obvious what the fans really want to see," said ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz.
"We want to give the American football fan what they watch football for -- and it is the post-touchdown end-zone dances," said Krulewitz.
Even academicians who study television viewing behavior were surprised by the strength of the finding. "Of course the viewers skip the commercials. Everybody knew that. And they slo-mo the cheerleaders jumping -- any wife could tell you that," said Dr. Kathryn E. A. Villani of Columbia University.
"But what surprised us is that they don't speed up to the touchdown plays -- but just past them to the end-zone dances. And it's not just the rare female football viewer who does it while her husband's up getting a beer; it's the men as well," added Villani.
With the success on Dancing with the Stars of NFL all-pro running back Emmitt Smith this season, and of future NFL Hall-of-Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice in the past, it's now apparent that ballroom dancing is a natural extension of football, say those study the culture of athletics.
"With Dancing with the Stars, the fans get just what they want, and more of it, without all the filler -- passes, catches, runs and tackles and stuff like that," said Dr. Douglass Harman of the American Mosaic Project at the University of Minnesota.
"Even in a high scoring game, football viewers get at most 30 to 45 seconds of end-zone dancing -- and it takes over three hours of viewing to get to that. Even with well-developed TIVO technique, the average fan is not willing to wade through that much dross week after week," said Harman.
"With Dancing with the Stars, the sport is distilled to its essence: dance, nothing but dance," he concluded.
When questioned, ESPN's Bodenheimer defended canceling MNF even though ESPN just paid $1.1 billion a year over eight years for the rights.
"Like an aging overpriced QB, sometimes you have to cut the player from your roster and eat the contract. If you win games without him, it still makes sense. So, if Dancing with the Stars wins its slot, we'll still come out ahead" said Bodenheimer.
In retrospect, Heisman-trophy-winning University of Southern California quarterback Matt Leinart's much derided red-shirt senior curriculum, nothing but a course in ballroom dancing, is looking like a stroke of genius, said Minnesota's Harman.
In light of ESPN's move, which FIFA is studying carefully, FIFA is considering the British series Strictly Come Dancing to see whether a version of it, with bonus scoring for jersey doffing, could be used to replace the 2007 World Cup.
Experts say this seems reasonable given the widespread international success of Dancing with the Stars, which is based on the format of the British series Strictly Come Dancing. Shows have aired in a number of countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, India, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Ukraine and the U.S.
Copyright 2006 Douglas Salguod
