Monday Night Football

• 1. Introduction

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  Monday Night Football kicked off its first broadcast on the 21st of September 1970, on ABC, and within a few years it had become one of the highest-rated programs on American television. Here was a league that had spent decades fighting for legitimacy, now commanding prime time on one of the three major networks, drawing audiences that dwarfed anything the sport had seen before. How did a single weekly game become a cultural institution? What explains the strange alchemy of football, celebrity, and music that turned Monday nights into national events? And why, after 35 years on ABC, did the whole arrangement come apart, only to reconstitute itself in even more elaborate form on cable and streaming? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. A Gamble on Third Place

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  NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had been thinking about prime-time football since the early 1960s. His first attempt, a bid to play on Friday nights in 1964, failed badly. Critics charged that Friday-night telecasts would hurt high school football attendance, and in any case the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 had already prohibited exactly that, alongside Saturday games, to protect college football. Rozelle did not give up. He persuaded CBS to carry a game on Monday night during the 1966 and 1967 seasons, then added a second game in each of the following two years. NBC ran its own Monday-night experiment in 1968 and 1969, using teams from the American Football League.

  When the time came to negotiate a contract beginning with 1970, Rozelle wanted a long-term weekly Monday-night deal with one of the three major networks. NBC and CBS both balked. Their Monday-night programming was performing well enough that executives saw no reason to disrupt the schedule for football. ABC was a different story. The network sat a distant third in prime-time ratings, and its Monday-night lineup was a particular weak spot. That calculation made ABC the willing partner Rozelle needed. The deal got done, and on a night when the other networks were playing it safe, ABC was about to play football.

• 3. The Entertainment Dimension

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  From early on, Monday Night Football treated the broadcast as something closer to a variety show than a straight sports telecast. Celebrity guests appeared regularly in the booth, among them former Vice President Spiro Agnew, singers Placido Domingo and John Lennon, former President Bill Clinton, and even Kermit the Frog. On the December 9 contest, Lennon and California governor Ronald Reagan were both in the booth at the same time, with Reagan explaining the rules of American football to Lennon off-camera while Howard Cosell interviewed Lennon and Frank Gifford spoke with Reagan.

  On the 8th of December 1980, that entertainment relationship with Lennon turned into something far graver. Howard Cosell interrupted the broadcast with a news flash announcing that John Lennon had been shot and killed in New York City. Monday Night Football was the first national broadcast to report his death. The moment underscored how central the show had become to the national conversation; millions of Americans found out from a sports broadcast.

  Decades later, an ABC advertisement featuring Nicollette Sheridan of Desperate Housewives and Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens generated at least 1,997 complaints to the FCC and drew a public response from FCC chairman Michael Powell. Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC and the majority owner of ESPN, also used the broadcast to promote its own properties, including a trailer for the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens and segments incorporating the Muppets.

• 4. Music and the Opening Theme

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  The show's original theme, "Score", was a funk and jazz-based composition featuring Hammond organ and electric guitar, composed by Charles Fox and produced by Bob Israel of Score Productions. Public interest in it was strong enough that Atco Records released it as a single in 1972. By 1975, MNF had switched to "Heavy Action", a production music piece written by Johnny Pearson that had originally appeared on the BBC's Superstars program from its 1973 debut. ABC programmers discovered it there and brought it to the broadcast, though at first it served only as background music.

  The identity that most viewers remember took shape in 1989, when Hank Williams Jr. reworked his country hit "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight" into "All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night". Williams became a fixture of the opening for more than two decades. That run ended abruptly on the 3rd of October 2011, when ESPN pulled the theme after Williams appeared on a cable news program and compared a golf outing involving Barack Obama, John Boehner, Joe Biden, and John Kasich to Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu. Three days later, ESPN announced a permanent separation. Williams responded by saying that the network had stepped on his First Amendment rights, and declared that he, his song, and all his rowdy friends were out.

  For 2023, ESPN debuted an entirely new opening: a cover of the 1981 Phil Collins classic "In the Air Tonight", featuring Chris Stapleton, Cindy Blackman Santana, and Snoop Dogg. The song was co-produced by ESPN's Creative Content Unit and Grammy-winning musician David Cobb, with lyrics written by M.K. Asante. It was retained for both the 2024 and 2025 seasons.

• 5. The Move to Cable

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  By the late 1990s and through the 2000s, despite the show's cultural footprint, ABC was losing millions of dollars on the telecasts. The NFL had also concluded that Sunday night was a better home for its marquee game; more people watch television on Sundays, and Sundays allow for flexible scheduling, a system by which the best late-season matchups can be moved from afternoon to evening on short notice. Monday games, fixed months in advance, could not guarantee that the most meaningful games of the week would appear under the national spotlight.

  ABC also had a specific program it wanted to protect. Desperate Housewives was performing well on Sunday nights, and the network preferred not to lose that audience. On the 18th of April 2005, ABC and the NFL announced the end of their 36-year partnership, with Monday Night Football moving to ESPN beginning with the 2006 season. In 2011, ESPN extended that contract for an additional eight seasons at a deal valued around 15 billion dollars, which also included expanded highlight, international, and streaming rights. A further deal signed in 2021 keeps ESPN's rights through 2033, with two Super Bowls, in 2027 and 2031, included in the arrangement.

  The shift to cable introduced one complication the league had to address directly. An NFL broadcasting policy required that games on pay television still be made available on a free over-the-air station in each participating team's local market, so that viewers without cable or satellite could watch.

• 6. Records, Rivalries, and Historic Moments

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  The highest-scoring game in Monday Night Football history took place on the 19th of November 2018, when the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 54-51, combining for 105 total points. The Chiefs' 51 points in that loss remain the most points scored by a losing team in NFL history. At the other extreme, the lowest-scoring game in the series produced a combined total of just 3 points, when Pittsburgh defeated Miami 3-0.

  The Dallas Cowboys hold the record for most Monday Night Football appearances, with 93. The Pittsburgh Steelers secured the all-time lead in wins on the 28th of November 2022, when they surpassed 58 victories. The most frequently played Monday Night Football matchup has been Denver Broncos versus the Las Vegas Raiders franchise, which have met 20 times on Monday nights.

  Candlestick Park in San Francisco holds the record for hosting the most Monday Night Football games of any single venue. Its 36th and final Monday night game was played on the 23rd of December 2013. Among active stadiums after the 2017 season, Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, had hosted the most games with 36 of its own. Eight NFL stadiums have made their regular-season debuts on Monday Night Football, the most recent being Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, which hosted its first NFL game on the 21st of September 2020, when the Las Vegas Raiders defeated the New Orleans Saints 34-24.

• 7. The Manningcast and the Streaming Era

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  On the 19th of July 2021, ESPN announced an agreement with Omaha Productions, the production company of Peyton Manning, to produce alternate telecasts of Monday Night Football with Manning, his brother Eli, and various celebrity guests. The Manningcast aired on ESPN2 and ESPN+ for ten games each season, covering the 2021 through 2023 seasons. The success of the first season led ESPN to extend that deal by an additional year.

  The streaming dimension of the broadcast expanded steadily through the same period. ESPN+ became the American streaming home for MNF beginning in the 2021 season. The 2023 season introduced flexible scheduling to Monday nights for the first time, enabling ESPN to select better matchups in Weeks 12 through 17. The first game ever flexed out of the MNF slot came in Week 15 of that season, when the originally scheduled Kansas City Chiefs at New England Patriots game was replaced by the Philadelphia Eagles at the Seattle Seahawks.

  On the 28th of October 2024, ESPN+ and Disney+ streamed an alternate broadcast of the Cincinnati Bengals against the Dallas Cowboys called The Simpsons Funday Football, using the league's player tracking data to render a live animated version of the game with characters from The Simpsons franchise. A year earlier, a London game between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars had used the same technology with characters from the Toy Story franchise. For the 2025 season, ABC announced that Monday Night Football would become a permanent part of its fall schedule, with the network committed to airing at least ten games.