Monday Night Football premiered 50 years ago today

[TMC]

https://nypost.com/2020/09/21/monday...tv-revolution/

Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson and Don Meredith called the first-ever Monday Night Football game on ABC on Sept. 21. 1970, a battle between the New York Jets and Cleveland Browns. ABC paid $8.5 million for the rights to Monday Night Football, a far cry from the nearly $2 billion ESPN currently forks over per year. Mike Vaccaro says of the significance of that night: "Something had just changed. And it sure felt like forever, even in the moment. It isn’t just that it’s hard to conjure a similarly impactful moment 50 years later; it’s actually all but impossible to remember a time when the idea of a prime-time football game could cause such a stir. In 1970, ESPN was nine years from birth. Charles Dolan would not found the operation that would become HBO for four more months. Pro football had dabbled in games outside its Sunday comfort zone a little; the AFL would play games on Fridays and Saturdays. Mostly, though, if you were an NFL fan before Sept. 21, 1970, you got two games on Sundays. In New York, that meant you got whichever local team was on the road that week (thanks to home-game blackout rules) on either Channel 2 (Giants) or 4 (Jets). And then a national game, usually involving the Packers, Browns, Chiefs or Cowboys on the other." Check out ABC-NFL contract for Monday Night Football.

Report: Fox is ready to pay as much as $2 billion to keep NFL games

"Fox Corp. is willing to spend as much as $2 billion a year to maintain its rights to National Football League games on Sundays, a huge increase from its current contract, according to people familiar with the matter," Bloomberg News reports. "Under the existing arrangement, the network airs games from the National Football Conference, featuring teams from the big media markets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. That makes it the most-coveted outlet for advertisers. Now Fox has to fend off other broadcasters, which also want to air high-profile matchups." The NFL's current broadcast rights expire at the end of next season.

How the NFL uses fake crowd noise to make it sound real

Viewers were stunned on Sunday when Philadelphia Eagles QB Carson Wentz was booed off the field in an empty Philly stadium. Turns out the boos were only played on TV, not in the stadium. NFL Films gives NFL broadcasters crowd noise from past games that are unique to each stadium as part of a project to enhance the TV experience during the pandemic. "During the project, the NFL hired local people, who were fans of the team in each market and provided them a unique briefcase of sounds," reports the New York Post's Andrew Marchand. "So, for example, the Jets’ system is completely different from the Giants and operated by a different person.....NFL Films happened to have just completed a four-year project in which they had collected crowd noise from all the NFL stadiums....Films needed to take hundreds of hours to strip the crowd noise from the in-stadium music, public address, etc. that was recorded as they made their prototype which was built off M&T Stadium, home of the Ravens. The enhanced broadcast noise is all the result of an arduous process that began in June with a combination of NFL Films, NFL broadcasting and Robert Brock from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Arizona, among those working together."

[AMackII]

Happy 50th Anniversary, Monday Night Football

[Mikey Osmond]

Didn't know Monday Night Football went back that far.