MNF Is Exactly 50 Years Old Today

[Wally Pryor 5244]

 

From Peter King:

Sept. 21, 1970: New York Jets at Cleveland, the first “Monday Night Football” game ever, on ABC. The Jets and Browns played in the old barn on Lake Erie, Municipal Stadium, on the first weekend of games between a merged AFL and NFL. For many Americans, MNF was their first exposure to prime-time football, and to a New York sportscaster with a nasally twang, Howard Cosell.

The matchup made sense. Browns owner Art Modell, a showman, and commissioner Pete Rozelle negotiated the MNF contract with ABC’s Roone Arledge. The NFL got turned down for the Monday night package by CBS and NBC; ABC, the weakest of the three networks, was motivated to take the package because of its poor prime-time lineup. Modell wanted the first game at home badly. What better visitor than Joe Namath’s Jets? It was a year-and-a-half after Namath engineered the biggest upset in NFL history, the Super Bowl III win over the Colts, and he was the biggest star in football. “Pete knew it would be a great scene,” league executive Joe Browne recalled. It was: 85,703 packed the stadium on a hot September night to watch.

But not even the players were optimistic the thing would work, a football game starting at 9 p.m. on a work night, a school night, a night devoted to entertainment TV. They were right. That year, “Monday Night Football” didn’t crack the top 35 of the network TV ratings. In Monday night viewership totals in autumn 1970, MNF ranked eighth of 11 network shows. It got beat on Monday nights by Here’s Lucy, Gunsmoke, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (Goldie Hawn in a bikini was pretty risqué for the time), Mayberry RFD, The Doris Day Show, NBC Monday Night at the Movies, and The Carol Burnett Show.

As hard as it is to think about the NFL being a ratings bomb behind seven shows on Monday night, well, football in prime time had to start somewhere. And now, prime-time football’s pretty commonplace. NBC’s Sunday Night Football has been the highest-rated show on television for nine straight years. That’s the longest streak for a top-rated show in TV history.

“That was a strange thought for all of us players,” Joe Namath, the visiting quarterback on the night of Sept. 21, 1970, told me the other day. “People are working. Monday night? Who’s gonna watch? Plus, for the players, since Pop Warner, high school, college, pro, whatever, who the heck ever played football on Monday night?”

[orange dream 1241]

Back in the day, MNF was the highlight of the football week.  It's certainly lost some magic but we'll always have Cosell and Dandy Don.