Former The Footy Show host Garry Lyon believes the show can keep surviving, despite plummeting ratings.
The Footy Show rated just 134,000 on Wednesday night, but Lyon still holds optimism for the show.
However, the former Melbourne captain has admitted some format changes should be in order.
SEN Breakfast with Garry Lyon and Tim Watson can be heard Monday-Friday 6-9am, and you can subscribe to the podcast here.
“Yes it can,” Lyon told SEN Breakfast, when asked if the show can survive with the current ratings.
“You would say yes (it will continue in 2019), but the one rider on all that is Sam Newman is out of contract.
“The Sydney show (the NRL Footy Show) has been doing that number for five years and survives, because commercially, it still writes big money. I know it’s hard to get your head around it but it’s the truth.
“Why else would the Sydney show have survived on numbers of 110 and 115 for the last five years – it writes big dollars.
“You wouldn’t be putting a show on air like that if it’s not paying its way.
“If it wasn’t paying its way, it wouldn’t be on.
“I thought it had to get back to 90 minutes, a hard 90. I didn’t think the panel needed to be there for the whole show, and probably would have rotated a couple of guests in and out.
“If you put a format in place in 1994, then it’s only standard reason that you’d probably be a different format if you were doing it in 2018.
“The response to that is, as I said the other day, the producers would turn around and say, it’s winning its slot and rating really well, why would we change it? And that was absolutely fair enough.
“They always used to say the teams gave the show structure. Whatever happened, you’d always have to come back to a game, which made sense.”
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