Yesterday’s ouster of Kevin Reilly as NBC's programming chief might seem to be coming at the worst possible time, just days before the upfront market, with some $9 billion in network ad sales at stake.

But media buyers say that NBC made the right decision at the right time, and they support the appointment of Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff as Reilly's replacements.

While buyers respect Reilly for loading up NBC's primetime schedule with critically acclaimed programs like “Heroes,” “30 Rock” and “Friday Night Lights,” and while they believe his emphasis on quality shows would pay off in time, they believe the network simply could not afford to wait.

The network has finished in fourth place for three seasons now, and the cost has been huge: $1 billion in lost upfront revenue since 2004.

The sense is that Silverman and Graboff will revive the network sooner than Reilly if he'd been left in place.

“In the short-term, this business is about hits, and NBC needs that,” says Serge Del Grosso, managing director of media strategy at Lowe New York. “They need a return to water-cooler hit programming. 'Heroes’ is one but they need that replicated across the schedule. They don’t have that yet but absolutely the short-term challenge is to revitalize the schedule.”

Silverman founded Reveille, the studio behind shows like NBC’s “Office.” Graboff is a longtime NBC executive. Reilly was hired by NBC in 2003, following a stint at FX, and became entertainment president in 2004.

The move to oust Reilly began bubbling up following Reilly’s upfront presentation two weeks ago. Buyers were not impressed and they told NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker they thought it would be another fourth-place season for the network.

Buyers say they were not so much disappointed in Reilly's pick of new shows as much as how those shows were positioned with returning shows on the primetime schedule. They don't think he did a good job balancing quirky shows with the mass-appeal programs. The quirky won out.

Only 7.3 percent of media buyers in a Media Life Magazine poll last week thought NBC had the strongest fall schedule.

“It's kind of quirky, offbeat stuff that [Reilly’s] been supporting but I don’t think it fits the image NBC still has of itself from when they were No. 1,” says Susan Hajny, broadcast research manager at GSD&M. “And I’m sure there were financial pressures on him. I don’t know Reilly personally but I don’t know that he was able to mix the financial pressures with the creative nature of his job.”

Lowe's Del Grosso thinks Reilly focused on the quality of programs at the expense of ratings.

“You have to have a balance between hit programming that draws sizeable audiences, because it’s still network television, and quality of content,” he says. “You can argue that Reilly invested in the quality of content but it wasn’t popular enough to draw in the masses.”

Buyers also fault Reilly for leaving NBC's Thursday night intact, despite last season's disastrous decline in ratings for the night. It's a night NBC long dominated, and it commands perhaps 30 percent of upfront revenue.

“It’s the most important night of television,” says Jordan Breslow, director of broadcast research at MediaCom. “Their ratings are down double digits and you leave it alone? I think NBC’s reaction was to shake things up.”

Most buyers say Silverman and Graboff will only be able to make tweaks to NBC’s fall schedule but most think there will be changes, perhaps with the rearrangement of shows.

“I absolutely think they’ll make some changes to the fall schedule,” says Bill Reynolds, vice president and media director at Erwin-Penland, a division of Hill Holliday. “Expectations for the fall are effectively lowered, so anything they do that’s positive is an improvement over where they were.”

One issue is how well NBC will do in terms of ad sales in the upfront after having fired Reilly. It would seem to be the ultimate statement of no confidence in its near-term prospects.

But buyers think the move will actually benefit NBC at the upfront. The very fact that it acknowledged just how weak its schedule is has won it the support of buyers. In the past, NBC has come under the harshest criticism for refusing to recognize that it was stumbling.