Monday Night Football

Monday Night Football (MNF), flagship National Football League (NFL) telecast that helped transform sports broadcasting in the United States.

Origins

About the time of the official merger of the NFL and the startup American Football League (AFL) into an expanded NFL in 1970, Commissioner Pete Rozelle sought to add a weekly Monday night game to the league’s regular Sunday afternoon offerings. Pro football’s broadcasting partners, CBS and NBC, had experimented with telecasts of Monday night NFL and AFL games, respectively, in the 1960s, but neither network was interested in committing to broadcasting a weekly Monday night game. So Rozelle approached ABC, whose ratings lagged behind the other two networks, and ABC agreed to start televising Monday Night Football. ABC tasked Roone Arledge with overseeing the new showcase of what was becoming America’s most popular sport. He would go on to revolutionize sports broadcasting with cutting-edge techniques.

A new approach to televising sports

Arledge bucked a league policy that had allowed the NFL to approve the announcers for its games. Freed from that straitjacket, ABC hired Howard Cosell, the outspoken commentator who would put his unique stamp on the telecast for more than a decade, starting with the inaugural 1970 season. Cosell’s distinctive style by turns delighted and alienated millions of viewers. “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, persecuting, distasteful, verbose, a show-off. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am,” Cosell wrote of himself in Cosell (1973). For Monday Night Football’s first season he teamed with play-by-play man Keith Jackson and colour commentator Don Meredith, who had retired as the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys in 1968. In the program’s second year, former New York Giant and future Pro Football Hall of Famer Frank Gifford replaced Jackson. According to The New York Times, this combination was “the most celebrated announcing crew in the history of American sports.”

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Monday Night Football helped change the format and style of televised American sports. Under Arledge and his director, Chet Forte, the telecast doubled the number of cameras usually employed to broadcast a football game and added more graphics. The three-man booth was also novel. In short, ABC sought to put on a show, not just a football game. As Cosell once bragged, “We have become—if I may continue to tell it like it is, which is my nature—bigger than the game.”

Colourful personalities

Cosell, a former lawyer who grew up in Brooklyn, and Meredith, a Texan nicknamed “Dandy Don,” engaged in lively banter that was must-see TV, as Meredith’s laid-back country style played off Cosell’s verbose and lawyerly manner. It was at least somewhat by design: during preparations for the Monday Night Football debut on September 21, 1970, Cosell told Meredith: “You’ll wear the white hat, I’ll wear the black hat.”

One of Meredith’s signature shticks was to sing Willie Nelson’s song “The Party’s Over” when the game was out of reach for the losing team. Sometimes Meredith carried his laid-back persona too far in the eyes of some viewers and network executives, such as at a game in Denver when he quipped, “We’re in the Mile High City and I sure am.” Monday Night Football was so popular in the 1970s that movie theatre attendance plummeted when the game was on. In 1976 it spawned ABC’s Monday Night Baseball.

Theme music

Music was a big part of the production of Monday Night Football. Early on, games were introduced by a funky organ-driven composition called “Score” by Charles Fox. It was replaced in the mid-1970s by the “ABC–Monday Night Football Theme,” featuring soaring horns. Starting in 1989, the opening offered Hank Williams, Jr., singing “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night,” which played on his hit “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight.” Williams’s line “Are you ready for some football?” became iconic.

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Part of the American fabric

Monday Night Football soon became ingrained in American culture, and its announcers booth sometimes hosted celebrities from other fields. In 1974 Ronald Reagan, then the Republican governor of California, and former Beatle John Lennon both appeared at the same game. Guests at other games included actor Burt Reynolds and Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew. Some six years after Lennon’s cameo, during a game between the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins, Cosell broke the news to many Americans that Lennon had been killed:

Remember, this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that news flash, which in duty bound, we have to take.

Cosell quit Monday Night Football after the 1983 season, which included a firestorm over his referring to a Black player as “that little monkey.” In departing, Cosell complained that the sport had become “a stagnant bore.”

There have been many other high-profile announcers in the program’s long history, including Alex Karras, Fran Tarkenton, Joe Namath, Al Michaels, Dan Dierdorf, O.J. Simpson, Boomer Esiason, Dan Fouts, John Madden, Joe Theismann, Mike Tirico, Ron Jaworski, Brian Griese, and Tony Kornheiser.

Perhaps the most unorthodox choice was comedian Dennis Miller, who before his first broadcast—a summer exhibition game in 2000—told Michaels, “If there’s anybody in this stadium more pumped up than me, they wouldn’t pass the league’s standardized drug test.” ABC reportedly had considered hiring ultraconservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh for the opening that went to Miller.

In 2006 Monday Night Football moved from ABC to ESPN (both of which were owned by the Disney Company), in the face of big losses by ABC. With its subscriber fees, ESPN was better positioned to make the program work financially.