The news that Hank Williams Jr. will return to ESPN’s Monday Night Football after a hiatus fueled by a Hitler comparison includes word that the revamped launch to the game will include “two additional contemporary music artists to freshen the song’s presentation.”
Per an industry source, the two contemporary artists are Jason Derulo and Florida-Georgia Line (pictured).
ESPN presumably will be announcing the addition of the two acts sooner than later. The opening was filmed Sunday in Nashville, which means that plenty of people already know that Derulo and Florida-Georgia Line were involved.
How important to a football broadcast is the opening? For ESPN, the Monday Night Football opening was regarded to be important enough to embrace someone they had shunned for making a foolish right-leaning political statement, at a time when some are blaming ESPN’s death spiral on a habit of having too many left-leaning views.
While it’s premature to suggest that ESPN is making decisions aimed at eliminating the impression that the network swings blue, it makes sense to wonder whether or not the next guy to make a comeback in Bristol will be Rush Limbaugh.