NBC Sunday Night Football

• 1. Introduction

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  NBC Sunday Night Football launched on the 6th of August 2006 with the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, and within five years it had done something no sports broadcast had managed before. For eight consecutive seasons starting in 2004, American Idol had sat at the top of the Nielsen charts as the most-watched program on American network television. No sport, no drama, no reality competition had budged it. Then Sunday Night Football did exactly that, claiming the top spot during the 2011-12 season and holding it for three straight years beginning with 2013-14. How a weekly football broadcast got there, and what it took to build the production machine behind it, is a story about contracts, announcers, theme songs, and the long rivalry between the broadcast networks for the crown jewel of American sports rights.

• 2. A Network Reclaims Football

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  NBC had carried NFL games before, airing American Football League and later American Football Conference games from 1965 until 1997, when CBS took over those rights. The network spent nearly a decade on the sidelines before the opportunity returned. ESPN had held the Sunday prime time rights from 1987 to 2005 under the Monday Night Football banner. When NBC stepped back in for the 2006 season, it did not start from scratch. NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol described his approach plainly: "I was not interested in the quote, unquote vanity of starting anew. There's not a lot of room for experimentation." He brought the existing production team with him. Play-by-play announcer Al Michaels, color commentator John Madden, producer Fred Gaudelli, and director Drew Esocoff all crossed over from the ABC era of Monday Night Football and took the same roles at NBC. The transition kept the production's institutional knowledge intact, and the first regular-season game under the new arrangement, the Miami Dolphins against the Pittsburgh Steelers, aired on the 7th of September 2006.

• 3. The Booth and Its Changes

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  John Madden's voice had been part of prime time NFL football for years by the time NBC launched, but the 2009 season opened without him. Madden retired prior to that season, and Cris Collinsworth moved into the color commentator chair. The Horse Trailer Player of the Game award, which Madden and Michaels had given out at the end of each telecast during the 2007 and 2008 seasons, was discontinued when Madden left. That award had roots in something Madden invented during his CBS days: the Turkey Leg Award for the Thanksgiving game in 1989. He later brought a version of the concept to Fox and then expanded it to cover every game of the year when he joined ABC in 2002. The 2006 season had used a different variation called the "Rock Star of the Game," with the MVP's photo placed on a display at the Top of the Rock observation deck atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Michaels anchored the booth for over fifteen years before Mike Tirico succeeded him following Super Bowl LVI in February 2022.

• 4. The Music of Sunday Night

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  Academy Award winner John Williams composed the instrumental theme, titled "Wide Receiver", that underpins the broadcast. The vocal side of the opening, however, changed several times and generated more public attention than almost any other element of the show. Singer-songwriter Pink reworked the Joan Jett song "I Hate Myself for Loving You" into "Waiting All Day for Sunday Night" for the 2006 season. Country singer Faith Hill replaced Pink in 2007 with a new arrangement of the same underlying song. Hill's intro attracted both criticism and cultural notice; it was lampooned on the 9th of October 2010 episode of Saturday Night Live, with host Jane Lynch playing Hill and Jason Sudeikis as Al Michaels. The South Park episode titled "Faith Hilling" also featured an obvious spoof of Hill's performance, and 30 Rock referenced it through the fictional character of Jenna Maroney. On the 15th of April 2013, Hill announced she would no longer sing the intro. Carrie Underwood took over beginning with the 2013 season, and her 2016 theme, "Oh, Sunday Night", drew on elements from her duet with Miranda Lambert. In 2018, Underwood wrote an entirely new song, "Game On", with co-writers Chris DeStefano and Brett James. After a plagiarism lawsuit from singer Heidi Merrill, NBC reverted to "Waiting All Day for Sunday Night", and the 2019 open featured Joan Jett herself performing inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the first time the SNF open was shot inside an actual NFL stadium rather than a soundstage.

• 5. The Ratings Record

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  Through the first four weeks of the 2010 NFL season, Sunday Night Football drew an average of 22.9 million viewers. That was the largest audience for the opening four weeks of any prime time NFL package in fourteen years, since ABC averaged 24.0 million viewers across four Monday Night Football broadcasts in 1996. The single highest-rated game in the show's run came on the 30th of December 2012, when the Washington Redskins hosted the Dallas Cowboys. That broadcast pulled in 30.426 million viewers and a household rating of 12.7, making it the most-watched regular-season prime time game in sixteen years. The previous record holder had been a Monday Night Football game on the 18th of November 1996, between the Green Bay Packers and the Cowboys, which drew 31.5 million viewers. For the 2013 season, Sunday Night Football averaged 21.9 million viewers across fifteen broadcasts, a five percent increase over 2012 and a three percent rise in the household rating to 12.9. The highest individual game that season was the Denver Broncos against the Indianapolis Colts on the 20th of October 2013, watched by 26.9 million people.

• 6. Contracts and Rights

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  NBC's current NFL contract runs from the 2023 season through the 2034 season and covers considerably more than a Sunday night game. The deal includes the season-opening Thursday night NFL Kickoff Game, a Thanksgiving night game, and at least two playoff games each year. NBC also holds the Super Bowl on a rotating basis with other rights holders, with upcoming dates in 2026 for Super Bowl LX, 2030 for Super Bowl LXIV, and 2034 for Super Bowl LXVIII, all falling in Winter Olympic years. Between 2023 and 2028, NBC can air one additional regular-season game exclusively on its Peacock streaming service; in 2024, that exclusive was a Friday night matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles, which was also the first NFL game ever played in Brazil. The first Super Bowl NBC aired under the post-2006 arrangement was Super Bowl XLIII, between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals, on the 1st of February 2009. The first Thanksgiving night game NBC broadcast under this contract was the New England Patriots against the New York Jets on the 22nd of November 2012, a game remembered for what became known as the Butt Fumble.

• 7. Beyond the Broadcast

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  The production choices made for Sunday Night Football spread across NBC's other sports properties over time. The graphics and scoring system introduced in 2006, designed by Troika Design Group, were among the first permanent on-screen time and score displays NBC had used outside of the Olympics; Fox had introduced constant scoring displays back in 1994. The SNF scoreboard format was adopted by NBC's coverage of Notre Dame football, the annual Bayou Classic, and National Hockey League games. The player-introduction format, in which starters on each side of the ball introduce themselves, became a cultural fixture as well: the Key and Peele television sketch "East/West Bowl" drew directly from it. Beginning in 2025, NBC extended the same player-introduction format to its NBA coverage, applying it to the visiting team. The Spanish-language dimension of the broadcast also grew over time; sister cable channel Universo began carrying full-season Spanish simulcasts starting with the 2015 season and aired Super Bowl XLIX in Spanish. Telemundo later picked up select games beginning in 2021, and broadcast Super Bowl LVI in 2022. Internationally, the show reaches audiences on TSN and CTV 2 in Canada, Sky Sports in the UK, 7mate in Australia, and, starting in 2025, Grupo Globo in Brazil, where Everaldo Marques returned as play-by-play announcer.