'MONDAY NIGHT' CHANGES PLAYBOOK.

Byline: Tom Hoffarth Staff Writer

A change of address for ``Monday Night Football'' starting in 2006 marks both the end of a television era and the next big billion-dollar Richter-scale jolt on the ever-changing sports media landscape.

ABC, which started the landmark prime-time National Football League game series in 1970, has decided it can't afford to pay the bills any longer with simple advertising dollars and will hand over the package to corporate partner ESPN, also owned by Disney, with an eight-year deal, it was announced Monday.

Also, NBC has jumped back into the NFL picture by acquiring a six-year Sunday night package that will reshape its prime-time lineup.

``Monday Night Football,'' which helped push sports as mainstream media entertainment programming, has been the second-longest-running show on broadcast TV history behind CBS' ``60 Minutes'' (which started two years earlier) and a Top 10 rated show since 1992. Until ``Desperate Housewives,'' it was the network's top-rated show for each of the past three years.

But recently, Disney hasn't felt it was getting a full return for investing $550 million a year in rights fees. Meanwhile, ESPN, which generates income both from advertising and cable-user fees, will draw more hard-core sports fans and can adjust better to an earlier-planned kickoff - 5:40 p.m. (Pacific time) vs. 6 p.m - that the NFL pushed for in negotiations.

Several industry reports are that ESPN will pay the NFL $1.1 billion per season in rights fees for the new ``Monday Night'' package - double what ABC paid.

George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports, said ``from the Disney perspective, it was a smart move for ABC by moving out of football and having ESPN move into Monday nights.''

Mark Shapiro, ESPN executive vice president, called it ``the next logical evolutionary step.''

And Michael Eisner, Disney's soon-to-be-departing chief executive officer, said in a statement, ``Sports television's pre-eminent series moves to the industry's pre-eminent brand.''

But while this was going on, ABC passed on Friday on keeping the Sunday night package of games and watched on Monday as NBC agreed to pay a reported $600 million a year for its deal, also starting in 2006.

NBC, which last did games in 1997, backed out from the previous NFL negotiations because network officials said the price was too steep and experimented with the XFL and current coverage of the Arena Football League.

This time, NBC sees the NFL as a way to create programming around the prime-time telecasts, which will have games kick off at 5:15 p.m. (Pacific time) and a pre-game show starting at 4 p.m. The NFL will also give NBC a flexible schedule to select better afternoon matchups for prime time in the final seven weeks of the season.

ESPN launched the Sunday night package in 1987 and made it ad-supported cable's highest-rated series for 18 consecutive years (7.3 rating, covering more than 6.5 million homes).

For the past few months, many industry analysts assumed that ABC and ESPN would simply exchange nights with their NFL prime-time package. But ABC couldn't reach a contract with the NFL on that because, as Bodenheimer said, ``it didn't make smart financial sense.''

NBC's package includes the 2009 and 2012 Super Bowls, the new Thursday night regular-season prime-time opener and two wild-card playoff games.

``Sunday is the most-watched night in television, so when the NFL proposed its first-ever Sunday night primetime broadcast package, all of us wanted to find a way to make it work,'' said Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Universal, in a statement. ``We acquired a top-10 show without negatively impacting our Monday through Sunday dominance in late night and we do it with four hours in prime, as opposed to the traditional two hours on Monday night.''

The ``Monday Night Football'' change from ABC to ESPN may also affect the status of broadcast team Al Michaels and John Madden, but Shapiro said ESPN has more than a year to figure out that assignment.

``It could be them, it could be our current Sunday night team (of Mike Patrick, Joe Theismann and Paul Maguire) or a combination of them,'' Shapiro said.

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue echoed the networks by saying: ``In the current media environment, Sunday is now the better night for our prime-time broadcast package. These agreements improve our television arrangements for our fans.''

In November, the NFL extended its Sunday afternoon TV packages with Fox and CBS from 2006 through 2011, and gave DirecTV a five-year extension on its ``NFL Sunday Ticket'' pay service. The league is still talking to the networks about an eight-game late-season package of Thursday and Saturday contests, which the league's own NFL Network might air. Fox is said to be most interested in that package for its cable partner, FSN.