There will still be football on Monday night.
And Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, weekend and holiday nights,
whatever night Guy Fawkes Day falls on and, for that matter, just
about any night of the regular season the NFL pleases. None of them
will seem quite as special anymore, especially when the games are
clunkers like Patriots 31, Jets 21.
By Jim Litke
There will still be football on Monday night.
And Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, weekend and holiday nights, whatever night Guy Fawkes Day falls on and, for that matter, just about any night of the regular season the NFL pleases. None of them will seem quite as special anymore, especially when the games are clunkers like Patriots 31, Jets 21.
But that’s how much clout the league has. It has colonized the tube like no sports rival before or since.
And really, that’s what the hoopla over “Monday Night Football” moving from ABC to ESPN — essentially, from one screen in the Disney megaplex to another — is about. The NFL is throwing itself an anniversary party, with more than a little help from its friends.
Thirty-five years on, it’s commemorating the night pro football began taking over as the real national pastime.
“It’s been a phenomenal ride,” play-by-play man Al Michaels said at the close of the telecast.
And as the NFL’s most recent check from ESPN proves — $8.8 billion for the next eight years — the party is still far from over.
On Sept. 21, 1970, when MNF made its debut, there were no sports on the air during the workweek, TV sets fit on end tables and coaxing the cameras down off the roof and onto the sidelines qualified as serious innovation. Today, those same sets are as big as garage doors, there’s another 500 channels and even the MPC Computer Bowl will be available in Hi-Def.
So MNF’s final broadcast luxuriated in its past. It loaded up on videotaped bits from Howard Cosell, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford, a string of puppets, presidents, celebrities and even a desperate housewife. It reminded anybody over a certain age that for the better part of two decades, MNF gave just as good buzz as it got.
Most kids couldn’t identify Cosell & Co. without using Google. But at the start, they were the show. NBC had “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In” and CBS had “Gunsmoke.” ABC took the gamble largely because it had nothing to lose.
To compete for viewers in that prime-time environment, a game needed some shtick. With Cosell calling the shots, that was rarely a problem. And with director Chet Forte skillfully wielding a few of the tools already in TV’s arsenal — live drama, storytelling, tight reaction shots — and improving others, the games looked and sounded like nothing else on TV.
Breaking through the clutter, though, is a lot harder now. MNF averaged a 10.9 rating this season headed into the finale on ABC; that’s half what they were in the peak year of 1981. Even so, just hanging onto an audience as big as MNF did, for as long as it did, was no small feat.
That’s why everything else on the broadcast looked so familiar: The shot of Pats quarterback Tom Brady looking to the sideline for a play call, zoomed in close enough to peg the day of his last shave; the slo-mo replay showing cornerback Assante Samuel’s knee was down (and twisting painfully) before he fumbled; Jets coach Herm Edwards biting both lips every time New England carved up another piece of the Meadowlands.
More than perhaps any other show, MNF changed not just when we watched sports, but what we expected to see. The back story on the hero. Frame-by-frame analysis of every big play. Crazed fans. Spectacle.
Kids today take all that — and more — for granted. They have video games every bit as vivid, and they can control the narrative. Being able to compete in a very different marketplace, three dozen seasons later, is why the NFL could ask for that $8.8 billion and get it.
With five minutes left to play Monday night, Michaels wrapped up a discussion about all the stadiums MNF visited over the course of 555 telecasts. What he said at the end was telling.
“It’s all about generating the revenue,” he said. “What else is new?”
Just this: ESPN, a cable network, could pick up Monday nights at that exorbitant price because it makes money on subscriber fees AND by selling ads. ABC only pockets what it sells in ads. It didn’t take much arm-twisting to move the show from one line on Disney’s annual budget to another. The real trick going forward will be turning it from red back to black.
To be sure of that, ESPN must find a way to field competitive teams in games that matter every week — the one innovation that ABC couldn’t come up with in 35 years.
