I'll respond to the other posts in this thread later on, as there's several issues people have raised. In the meantime, I'll first focus on this one:
This has meant that Thursday & Friday night football games and the Sunday games have been largely forgettable this year as Nine tends to favour the "bigger" teams - and by and large they're the boring bastards.
I agree 100%.
Thankfully, the NRL takes over the schedule in 2018 (beginning of the next tv rights deal). This has been LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG overdue. Until then, I can 99.9% guarantee when the draw is released in the off-season, it will be the same teams monopolising the Ch9 matches in 2017 that have been over the past few years: Brisbane, Parramatta, Canterbury, St George/Illawarra, and South Sydney.
I miss the days of Friday Night double headers and a Super Saturday which went from 5.30pm to 11pm
So what if some games weren't shown live. f**k the TV stations for cramming the repeat games with ads and killing the best scheduling we ever had.
I've made it clear numerous times that I'm no fan of the Saturday afternoon timeslot. Although it's attracted ok crowds this season, people seem to forget why it thrown into the garbage bin after 2002, only to be revived again in late 2013 because fans were complaining about the lack of day games. Most people work on Saturday, not to mention children's sport and other lower-grade RL matches played at that time. Saturday arvo was scrapped in 2001 in favour of the 5:30pm timeslot, only to be reintroduced in 2002. During 2002, no team wanted to host matches in that timeslot, leaving the Melbourne Storm to pick up the crumbs and having to go head-to-head against marquee AFL matches at the MCG/Etihad. Crowds in that timeslot were only slightly better than they were in the pre-SL days when ABC televised it, and Fox tv ratings were terrible.
Like you, I do miss when Super Saturday was 5:30-11pm. The only change I would make to it is instead of the previous 1 x 5:30pm/2 x 7:30pm format, I would have 2 x 5:30pm (viewers choice, both replayed again at 9:30pm)/1 x 7:30pm, with the marquee Saturday match being the one played at 7:30pm. If the competition expands to 18 teams and Perth is admitted, it also opens up the 9:30pm timeslot on the eastern states for a Perth home game.
Any future addition of day games must be on a Sunday, end of story. Sunday football is the fabric of the game. Unfortunately, the NRL has this fixation on not having games overlapping each other, citing that it will affect the future tv rights value. Well...AFL/NFL/EPL etc. all have games in the round which overlap. They all attract good tv rights deals, and at the same time have a good % of matches in family-friendly timeslots.
Next year is going to get worse with the Friday 6pm game, which IMO was News Ltd's way of screwing over the fans in retaliation after Dave Smith brought an end to MNF with the Ch9 deal. I still remember when Slothfield first started spruiking the Friday 6pm match when Dave Smith took MNF away, thinking at the time it was just a bad joke and Sloths had one too many beers at the pub, but I absolutely couldn't believe when it was announced by the ARLC. I still can't believe the ARLC agreed to this. Who the hell signed off on this 'brilliant' idea? With the exception of the Warriors (where it will be 8pm over in NZ), there's going to be a big crapfight with NRL club administrators over the allocation of the Friday 6pm matches, and crowds are going to be abysmal (Good Friday being the only exception, since its a public holiday). Brisbane have already made it clear that they cannot host Friday 6pm matches due to restrictions on public transportation. Furthermore, the 6pm match pushes the Ch9 Friday night kickoff back to about 8:10-15pm (as we all know Ch9 love to have their extended pre-game shows), with full-time occurring at close to 10pm. Thursday 8pm/Friday 6pm/Friday 8:10-15pm....the first 3 timeslots of the round hardly attractive to families. I'll address this point in more detail in my reponse to one of the posts in this thread later on in the evening. Regarding your point on the Friday night double header: if the NRL was going to end up agreeing to Friday 6pm/8:10-15pm matches, they would've been far better off going back to 2 Friday night matches (commencing no later than 7:50pm)
