NFL on CBS

• 1. Introduction

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  NFL on CBS first aired on the 30th of September 1956, with a game between the Washington Redskins and the Pittsburgh Steelers. At that moment, professional football on national television was still a fragile experiment. The DuMont Television Network had just shut down after years of decline, and CBS scrambled to fill the void, striking deals not with the league itself but with individual teams. What followed was nearly four decades of football that shaped not just a network but the culture of American Sunday afternoons. How did a patchwork of nine regional sub-networks become the home of the Super Bowl? What happened when a brand-new upstart called Fox came along and outbid everyone? And what was said on the air during the final goodbye broadcast in 1994?

• 2. Nine Networks, No Contract

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  CBS began broadcasting NFL games without a league-wide deal. Every club except the Cleveland Browns signed on with the network. To make regional matchups work for regional audiences, CBS divided itself into nine sub-networks: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Washington, Green Bay, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Games were broadcast with what the network called "split audio," meaning the same video picture went to both teams' markets, but each city heard its own local announcers. A visiting team's fans could follow their squad through their hometown voices, no matter where the game was played. By 1959, CBS had at least eleven teams under contract, with Cleveland still the lone holdout. The 1961 season was the last year any NFL team handled its own television arrangements independently. On the 17th of September 1961, CBS Sports broadcast what it described as the first remote 15-minute pre-game show on network sports television, called Pro Football Kickoff, originating from NFL stadiums across the country. Then, in 1962, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and CBS agreed to a league-wide revenue sharing plan. CBS would telecast all regular season games for an annual fee of $4.65 million. The individual-deal era was over.

• 3. Color, Space, and Controversy

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  On the 25th of November 1965 - Thanksgiving Day - CBS made history with the first color broadcast of a regular-season NFL game, the traditional Thanksgiving Day game at Detroit. Crucially, CBS noted it was only the second time the network's first color mobile unit had been used; it had been deployed a month earlier to cover the attempted launch of an Atlas-Agena rocket, the rendezvous target for the Gemini 6 space mission. By 1968, all CBS NFL telecasts were in color. That same year, on December 22, CBS interrupted coverage of a playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and Baltimore Colts to broadcast a live transmission from inside the Apollo 8 spacecraft, headed toward the Moon. The interruption began three minutes before halftime and lasted 17 minutes. CBS showed highlights of the missed action when it returned; neither team had scored during the break. Even so, the network received approximately 3,000 complaints. That year also marked a production shift. CBS abandoned its practice of assigning dedicated announcing crews to particular teams. In its place the network instituted what it called a semi-merit system, with the most prominent crews assigned to the biggest games regardless of who was playing. The theme music of the era was equally eclectic: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, CBS used a marching band arrangement of "Confidence," drawn from Leon Carr's score for the 1964 off-Broadway musical The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

• 4. The Ice Bowl Broadcast

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  Ray Scott called the first half of the 1967 NFL Championship Game between the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, with Jack Buck taking over play-by-play for the second half. Frank Gifford handled color commentary for the full game, and Pat Summerall served as a sideline reporter. Gifford and Summerall both knew Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi personally, having played on the New York Giants when the two men were coaching there together. With 16 seconds remaining and Green Bay facing third-and-goal at the Dallas two-foot line, quarterback Bart Starr asked right guard Jerry Kramer whether he could get traction on the icy turf for a wedge play. Kramer said yes. Summerall had told the rest of the CBS crew to prepare for a rollout pass, because a failed run with no timeouts left would end the game. Landry later said he also expected a rollout, because an incomplete pass would stop the clock and give Green Bay one more play. Instead Starr kept the ball and scored. Over 30 million people watched. Gifford recounted in his 1993 autobiography The Whole Ten Yards that he requested and received permission to enter the losing Dallas locker room for post-game interviews, a practice unheard of at the time. He found Don Meredith, who said in an emotion-choked voice that he did not feel the Cowboys had truly lost because of the effort they gave. Gifford wrote that Meredith's introspective answers contributed to his selection for ABC's Monday Night Football telecasts three years later. No complete copy of the telecast is known to exist.

• 5. The NFL Today and Summerall-Madden

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  In 1975, CBS launched The NFL Today, a pre-game show hosted by journalist Brent Musburger and former NFL player Irv Cross, with former Miss America Phyllis George among the reporters. Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder joined in 1976 and was dismissed in January 1988 after making remarks about racial differences among NFL players on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. In 1979, the first year the Sports Emmy Awards were given to sportscasts, The NFL Today was among the recipients. The show would become the highest-rated program in its time slot for 18 consecutive years - longer than any other program on television. The same year The NFL Today launched, CBS used Meco's disco arrangement of John Williams's "Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band" as a musical theme during the years 1977 to 1979. The bigger transformation came from an unexpected pairing: John Madden, who had joined CBS in 1979, was clearly going to be the network's star color commentator, but CBS executives debated whether Pat Summerall or Vin Scully should be his play-by-play partner. Both men had scheduling overlaps - Summerall called the US Open tennis tournament and Scully led CBS Radio's baseball postseason coverage - so CBS auditioned both alongside Madden before choosing Summerall. Director Sandy Grossman joined the Madden-Summerall team in 1981 and stayed with them for 21 seasons. Madden insisted that Grossman and producer Bob Stenner watch coaches' films of NFL teams to help Grossman select the best camera angles. Grossman is credited as the first director to widen the camera shot to capture outside linebackers in full. During a New York Giants-Cincinnati Bengals game in 1991, Stenner and Grossman made 1,100 individual decisions about camera angles and cuts.

• 6. The Telestrator and the Super Bowl Record

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  On the 24th of January 1982, the San Francisco 49ers defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 26-21 in Super Bowl XVI. CBS scored a 49.1 rating and a 73 share, the highest-rated Super Bowl of all time up to that point. Summerall and Madden called the game together for the first time in a Super Bowl. During the telecast, the telestrator made its major network debut, introduced by CBS as the "CBS Chalkboard." Madden used the device to diagram football plays on screen for viewers, and the tool is generally credited with popularizing telestration as a standard part of sports commentary. Just four years earlier, at Super Bowl XII on the 15th of January 1978, CBS had already broken records. The Dallas Cowboys defeated the Denver Broncos in front of what was described as the largest audience ever to watch a sporting event. CBS scored a 47.2 rating and a 67 share. That game was also the first Super Bowl played in prime time. The kickoff was at 5:17 p.m. Central Standard Time. CBS's broadcast of Super Bowl XXI at the end of the 1986 season was the first NFL game broadcast in Dolby Surround sound and in stereo. On the 8th of December 1987, Cathy Barreto became the first woman to direct an NFL game at the network television level, for the Minnesota Vikings-Detroit Lions telecast. On the 26th of January 1992, the Super Bowl XXVI telecast was seen by more than 123 million viewers nationally, second only to the 127 million that had watched Super Bowl XX. During that game, Lesley Visser became the first female sportscaster to preside over the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation ceremony.

• 7. Fox, Fox, Fox

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  CBS initially planned to offer the NFL $250 million per year for a new long-term deal, which would have amounted to a $15 million rate cut. NFL TV Committee Chairman Art Modell and other longtime owners were prepared to accept it. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen furiously rejected the offer and forced CBS to resubmit. Fox then placed a bid of $1.58 billion for the four-year contract covering the National Football Conference, far exceeding what CBS offered even after network chairman Laurence Tisch agreed to raise the offer to $295 million a year. The NFL accepted Fox's bid on the 18th of December 1993. The NFC was considered the more desirable package because its teams were in the country's largest markets: New York, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. CBS lost its NFL rights after 38 years. Fox, which had debuted only seven years earlier and had no sports division, hired many former CBS personalities, including Pat Summerall, John Madden, James Brown, Terry Bradshaw, Dick Stockton, and Matt Millen. The consequences for CBS were severe. The network lost key affiliates, particularly in Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee, where NFC team markets switched to Fox. CBS purchased WWJ-TV in Detroit, a UHF station, only days before its longtime Detroit affiliate WJBK was set to switch to Fox. Ratings for CBS programming in these markets declined significantly, and the network's troubles extended well beyond sports. Even the Late Show with David Letterman, which had dominated The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in its first two years, saw its ratings fall partly because of the affiliation switches. CBS broadcast its final NFL game as the NFC rights holder on the 23rd of January 1994, when Dallas defeated San Francisco in the NFC Championship Game, 38-21. After the game, Greg Gumbel signed off: "So many men and women, so many talented men and women who have combined their efforts in order to bring you what you know is quality football coverage ever since it began 38 years ago, they shouldn't be forgotten." A photo montage of CBS's most memorable NFL moments followed, set to the instrumental piece "After the Sunrise" by Yanni.

• 8. The Return

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  CBS returned to NFL broadcasting on the 6th of September 1998, after a four-year absence. The network came back by taking over the American Football Conference package, the conference it had never held during its original run. Don Criqui, who had left CBS for NBC in 1978, returned to the network that same year. When CBS resumed coverage, it introduced its own version of John Madden's Turkey Leg Award tradition, calling it the "All-Iron Award." Several remixed versions of the theme music CBS had debuted during the 1993 season were used through the end of the 2002 season, when CBS replaced its entire NFL music package with compositions by E.S. Posthumus. From 2014 to 2017, CBS also broadcast Thursday Night Football games during the first half of the NFL season, through a production partnership with NFL Network - adding a weeknight presence that would have been unimaginable when the network first pieced together nine regional sub-networks more than half a century earlier.