Monday Night Football History
Monday Night Football has enjoyed success throughout its 39-year run. The weekly game is popular not only with fans, but with players, as it guarantees a full national telecast of the game and puts both teams in the spotlight.
Teams are selected for Monday Night Football games based partially on their success during the previous season, rewarding the best teams and biggest stars.
Teams with large national fan bases such as the Dallas Cowboys, Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots, Oakland Raiders, and Pittsburgh Steelers, among others, usually appear on Monday Night Football as well regardless of their previous season’s record. Teams can make a maximum of three Monday night appearances per season.
Since 2003, to avoid any scheduling unfairness where a team may have five days between games and others six (or seven) before the first playoff game, there is no Monday night game during the final week of the regular season. From 2003 until 2005, one game was played on Thursday and another Monday under the Monday Night Football banner. Starting in 2006 when the series moved to cable, two games are played on the opening Monday night to capitalize on fan interest during “Kickoff Weekend”. The necessity of advance scheduling sometimes results in late-season contests between lesser teams, and teams which do better than expected may not get to play on Monday Night Football until the next year.
Really, who’s ever watched or not watched a sporting event based on the announcer? Especially a telecast as ritualistic as Monday Night Football. Seems obvious, right? The only people who seem not to understand this are the network execs tasked with wringing one more dollar from their broadcasts. They’re doomed to a quixotic quest to recapture the 1970s ratings juggernaut when Howard Cosell and Don Meredith routinely jousted in the press box. But those days of (three-network) television are long gone.
When Monday Night Football premiered on September 21, 1970, there was no competition from cable. Three television geniuses, if that’s not an oxymoron, created the show. All are now dead.
Roone Arledge was the brilliant and innovative showman who brought his gift for storytelling to sports television as the longtime president of ABC Sports.
Cosell was the brainy, bombastic Brooklyn-born lawyer with the grating voice, a face made for radio and the fearlessness that enabled him to take on the sports establishment.