NFL on Fox

• 1. Introduction

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  NFL on Fox launched on the 12th of August 1994, with a preseason game between the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park. At that moment, a network that most of the industry still thought of as "the one that has that cartoon show" had just secured the most valuable sports property in American television. The questions that moment raised were enormous. How did a fledgling broadcaster manage to pry the National Football Conference away from CBS, which had held it for nearly four decades? What did the gamble cost? And what did Fox do with those rights that changed how every American sports broadcast looked and sounded for generations to come?

• 2. Fox Courts Football

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  Fox's pursuit of the NFL began long before the network could credibly claim to be in the same league as ABC, CBS, or NBC. Fox management studied how soccer programming had driven the rise of the British satellite service BSkyB, and concluded that professional football could do the same for them in America. In 1987, Fox's first full year on the air, the network made an offer to acquire the Monday Night Football contract for the same amount ABC had been paying at the time, roughly $1.3 billion. The NFL declined, in part because Fox had not yet proven itself as a major broadcaster.

  By 1993, the league's television contracts were up for renewal again. Many analysts expected the NFL to receive less than the $3.6 billion for four years that a consortium of ABC, CBS, NBC, TNT, and ESPN had paid in 1990. Fox saw its opening. More than 85% of its affiliates were UHF stations, and the network's most famous properties were shows like The Simpsons and Married... with Children. Fox bid $1.58 billion for a four-year contract to broadcast the National Football Conference, exceeding CBS's bid by more than $100 million per year.

  CBS was also caught at a vulnerable moment. The network was running a distant third in the ratings and was deep in cost-cutting measures under Laurence Tisch. On the 17th of December 1993, the NFL announced it had chosen Fox's bid, stripping CBS of football for the first time since 1956. The unexpectedly high bids across all the new contracts pushed the NFL's new salary cap, introduced that same year, to $34 million from an originally predicted $32 million.

• 3. Raiding CBS's Talent

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  John Madden joked when he joined Fox that the network should be called Fox Sport, singular, "because the only sport we had at Fox was football, NFL football." He and Pat Summerall had been CBS's lead broadcast team, and Fox hired them both. The hiring was part of a deliberate campaign to transplant CBS Sports into Fox Sports overnight.

  Fox brought in David Hill from Rupert Murdoch's U.K.-based Sky Sports to build and run the new division. Hill hired longtime CBS producer Ed Goren as his second-in-command. Terry Bradshaw, who had been a co-host of The NFL Today on CBS, was signed to anchor Fox's new pregame show. Dick Stockton and Matt Millen, also from CBS, became the network's second broadcast team. James Brown, who had called play-by-play for CBS game telecasts, was hired to host the pregame studio show.

  For its lower-level broadcast crews, Fox also brought in a generation of younger announcers whose fathers had defined sports broadcasting: 26-year-old Kenny Albert, son of Marv Albert; 30-year-old Thom Brennaman, son of Marty Brennaman; 25-year-old Joe Buck, son of Jack Buck; and 34-year-old Kevin Harlan, son of Green Bay Packers executive Bob Harlan. The raid on CBS went beyond personnel. Fox struck a deal with New World Communications on the 23rd of May 1994, in which News Corporation purchased a 20% interest in the company, and nearly all of New World's stations switched to Fox. The deal gave Fox VHF affiliates in eight primary markets, including Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, and Tampa, adding to the four the network had held before.

• 4. Same Game, New Attitude

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  Fox promoted its NFL package with the slogan "Same Game, New Attitude," and the attitude was shaped largely by David Hill's unconventional instincts. Hill later said that most of his concepts about how sport should be produced, he had stolen from video games, and he suggested to Madden that Fox's broadcasts should resemble the Madden NFL video game.

  The most lasting innovation was the FoxBox, a continuous on-screen graphic displaying the score and game clock throughout every broadcast. Hill had originally developed the concept for Sky Sports's coverage of the English Premier League. Fox's first Super Bowl broadcast, Super Bowl XXXI at the end of the 1996 season, was the first Super Bowl to feature a constant, live-updating graphic for the score, time, down, and distance. Rival networks eventually adopted the idea, and it became the norm across virtually all sports broadcasts at the national and regional level.

  The pregame show, Fox NFL Sunday, deliberately emphasized entertainment over in-depth tactical discussion. Fox also deployed parabolic microphones to capture the sounds of the crowd and the field, including conversations and strategy exchanges between coaches and players. These techniques drove further innovations across the industry, including the virtual first-down line and virtual scrimmage line graphics that now appear in every NFL broadcast.

  The iconic NFL on Fox theme music was composed by Scott Schreer, who designed it as a contrast to existing sports themes, giving it a dark, orchestral, and cinematic sound. The inspiration came from Fox Sports president David Hill, who heard the opening theme from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film while waiting in line for an amusement park ride in California. Hill called creative director George Greenberg and suggested the theme should sound like "Batman plays football." Greenberg described Hill's brief to Schreer as "Batman on steroids." Schreer and his team pitched three separate pieces; Hill and Greenberg spliced them together into the final version.

• 5. Summerall, Madden, and the End of an Era

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  Pat Summerall and John Madden had been paired together since 1981 on CBS, and by the time they reunited at Fox they were the most famous broadcast duo in the NFL. They called three Super Bowls together on Fox: Super Bowl XXXI, Super Bowl XXXIII, and Super Bowl XXXVI. Super Bowl XXXI became the highest-rated program in the then-ten-year history of the Fox network, a record it still shares with Super Bowl XLII.

  Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002 was Summerall's 26th and final Super Bowl broadcast on television or radio, and the eighth and final Super Bowl for the Summerall-Madden team. That same broadcast was presented in a widescreen format Fox marketed as "Fox Widescreen," the first U.S. sporting event produced in widescreen with the same production as the main feed for standard-definition viewers.

  Madden left Fox after the 2001 season for ABC to join Monday Night Football alongside Al Michaels. He would become the first person to call Super Bowls on different networks in consecutive years when he called Super Bowl XXXVII on ABC. Summerall continued calling games for Fox in 2002, working primarily Dallas Cowboys games alongside Brian Baldinger. Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, and Cris Collinsworth replaced Summerall and Madden as the number one announcing team, though Buck's schedule was often complicated by his Fox baseball obligations, which required other announcers to fill in for him during the Major League Baseball playoffs each fall.

• 6. Contracts, Departures, and Tom Brady

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  On the 14th of December 2011, Fox, NBC, and CBS jointly announced an extension of their NFL rights deals through the 2022 season. The agreement included a continuing rotation of the Super Bowl among the three networks, meaning Fox would air Super Bowls XLVIII, LI, LIV, and LVII. The deal also introduced a "cross-flexing" policy in 2014 allowing a limited number of NFC games assigned to Fox to be moved to CBS, and vice versa.

  On the 31st of January 2018, Fox announced it had acquired broadcast television rights to Thursday Night Football from 2018 through 2022, airing eleven games per season in simulcast with NFL Network at a reported average cost of $660 million per season.

  On the 18th of March 2021, a new rights deal was announced covering Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC through the 2033 season. Fox retained its NFC Sunday afternoon package and gave up Thursday Night Football. Under the new deal, Fox will air Super Bowls LIX, LXIII, and LXVII.

  The 2022 offseason brought the departure of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, who left for ESPN to become the broadcast team for Monday Night Football. Fox then announced on the 10th of May 2022, that it had signed Tom Brady to serve as its lead color commentator upon his retirement from playing. The contract was a ten-year, $375 million deal, making Brady the highest-paid analyst in the history of sports broadcasting, surpassing both Aikman and CBS's Tony Romo. Kevin Burkhardt was confirmed as the play-by-play partner, with Greg Olsen staying in the booth until Brady joined. Brady officially began his role in the fall of 2024.

• 7. The Graphics That Remade Sports Television

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  When Fox's NFL telecasts debuted in 1994, the network introduced what it called a "scoring bug," a transparent graphic in the upper left corner of the screen showing the score and game clock throughout the entire broadcast. No NFL television broadcast had done this before.

  The FoxBox went through a series of redesigns over the following decades, each iteration responding to changes in technology, broadcast format, and viewer expectations. By the 2006 season, the banner changed colors to match the team currently in possession of the ball. That same season, a virtual on-field arrow graphic showing direction of advancement and down-and-yardage information began appearing on every play from every game; CBS, NBC, ESPN, and NFL Network all adopted the feature over the following two years.

  When Fox began broadcasting in widescreen in 2010, using a new graphics infrastructure built on Vizrt products, the score bug shifted to an unconventional FoxBox-style layout in the top-left corner with team logos, scores, timeout lights, and the play clock arranged around a central display. The format required Fox to ask cable and satellite providers to use a specific widescreen display code to avoid letterboxing for viewers still on 4:3 screens.

  A more unusual footnote came on the 31st of December 2006. A blizzard hit Denver and prevented Fox's usual equipment from arriving in time for the San Francisco 49ers-Denver Broncos regular season finale. Fox Sports Net Rocky Mountain stepped in on short notice and provided its own graphics infrastructure, meaning that game aired with a different graphics package than every other Fox broadcast that season. The "1st and Ten" virtual first-down line was also unavailable for that telecast.