Why People in Mississippi Have to Watch the Giants By KEVIN DRAPERNOV. 19, 2017
Most football fans in the South who turn on CBS at 1 p.m. Sunday to watch N.F.L. football will see Baltimore at Green Bay. A much smaller portion of the audience in the South — mostly those living in Florida — will see Jacksonville at Cleveland.
And then there is the pocket of TV viewers in Mississippi who will be shown Kansas City at the Giants. The Giants are a very bad team, and the Chiefs are not exactly Mississippi’s team.
So what’s the explanation?
On each Sunday during the football season, CBS and Fox broadcast several football games simultaneously, but send only one to your home. The process by which the networks decide which game you will see is called regionalization.
At CBS, the executives Rob Correa and Kelly Wood, along with a team of researchers and staff members, decide which one. Each week, they prepare a preliminary schedule for three weekends out, a tentative schedule for two weekends out and a final schedule for one weekend out.
“We never know what week it is,” Correa said. “We literally come in on Sunday and go, ‘What week is it?’ ”
There are compelling — and often contradictory — justifications for placing certain games with each of the 200-plus CBS affiliates, but generally it comes down to predicting which game will draw the biggest rating. Strategy, Correa dismissed, is “a fancy word for picking the best games.”
But Correa and Wood can’t put the games just anywhere. There are myriad N.F.L. rules, broadcast restrictions and requests from local CBS affiliates influencing the process. They must consider esoteric sports-broadcast issues like home blackouts, flexing, cross flexing, prime flexing, constants, mandatory pullouts, primary markets, secondary markets and protected games.
In other words, it’s not as easy as, “Hey, everybody either really hates or really loves the Patriots, so let’s just put that game on everywhere.”
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