NFL RedZone will air commercial messages on a regular basis for the first time this season, but a league spokesperson said football will remain on-screen while the ads run in a side-by-side box.
The NFL tested four individual ads during one Sunday last December, and the number of spots appearing this Sunday afternoon will remain limited, the league said. In December, each commercial popped up alongside football action, with audio running for roughly 10-15 seconds. The NFL said its previous tests resulted in “extremely limited negative feedback,” including in focus group responses. However, RedZone host Scott Hanson’s mention of ads while appearing on The Pat McAfee Show Wednesday sparked Reddit rancor and X acrimony, with some number of fans coming to believe—falsely—that the ads would be more disruptive than those trials and that ESPN was behind the change.
RedZone has integrated promotional material for years, with Amazon Prime Video and DraftKings sponsoring the show and certain segments. A relatively young audience of locked-in viewers makes the property particularly appealing to advertisers despite the show’s celebration of its interruption-free nature going back to its 2009 debut. Now Hanson’s signature sign-on, welcoming viewers to “seven hours of commercial-free football,” is officially dead, he said. The host will instead introduce “seven hours of RedZone football” starting in Week 1.
The move was made entirely by the NFL. ESPN recently made a notable acquisition of NFL Media rights, but it will only gain distributional control over RedZone, rather than production responsibilities, and only if/when its takeover is approved by regulators, which is expected to take at least a year.
RedZone is available in cable packages, as an add-on to YouTube’s Sunday Ticket service, or directly from the NFL as part of its NFL+ subscription offering, which the league is retaining in the ESPN transaction. Starting Wednesday, fans can buy NFL+ Premium and ESPN’s direct-to-consumer product together for $40/month.
Speaking to Pat McAfee, Hanson added that he won’t be using the commercials to take a bathroom break. Fans are likely to stay where they are too, though they might pull their phones out.
“We are not going to sacrifice any great football for any of the business things,” Hanson said. “The business folks are going to handle the business, and we play the hand that’s dealt us. But we will not miss a touchdown. We will not say, ‘Oh ok, this is first-and-goal from the five, but let’s, you know, sell some pizza or pickup trucks.’”