Sports Preemption

"Continuous Cricket: What I thought was a game played in high school, only to discover it's Channel Nine's summer programming."

- The Coodabeen Champions Take a Good Hard Look at Australia

On network TV, when sporting events run longer than the scheduled time, the following program (usually syndicated) is pre-empted and the game remains on air until it is finished. In other instances, network programming will be delayed until the game ends, such as when FOX began showing football on Sunday afternoons, delaying The Simpsons by as much as 15 minutes.

This practice goes back to a 1968 AFL game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders that aired on NBC, known as the Heidi Game. The last 65 seconds of the game were cut off when the scheduled three-hour timeslot ended and a made-for-TV movie adaptation of Heidi went to air. In the unaired minute, the Raiders took the lead and won the game. NBC was widely criticized for cutting away from the game, and made a public apology.

If the game was allowed to run into overtime, there was considerable blowback from non-sports fans (and sports fans who enjoy other shows) about joining "your regularly scheduled programming" already in progress. Many times, this cut important parts of a show (as, on a show such as CSI or NCIS, the majority of the plot – the murder – will be set up within the first five minutes.) There were also instances where the start of a subsequent program (like the flagship "60 Minutes" news magazine on CBS on Sunday evenings) would be shifted to begin when the game ended; this created its own problems if the show was being exported to networks in other countries (such as Canada) at the same time is was going out on the US domestic network.

Networks will now often block out extra time for this, making the remainder a post-show of indeterminate length. That way, if a broadcast goes long, the game will only eat into the time allotted for the post-show, which will often only last to round out the hour, and THEN go into the rest of the TV schedule.