Monday Night Football: How a 1970 Gamble Changed the NFL

Monday Night Football is the second-longest-running prime-time series in American television, behind only 60 Minutes, and it exists because a commissioner couldn't get anyone to take his idea seriously. Fifty-six years on, the Monday night game is a fixed point in the American week. Here's how it happened.

The idea nobody wanted

Pete Rozelle spent the 1960s trying to move professional football into prime time. His first instinct was Friday night, which went nowhere because high school football owned Friday and nobody in the sport was willing to compete with it. Monday was the fallback.

The league tested it quietly first. Green Bay played Detroit on a Monday night in September 1964, CBS carried one Monday game a season in 1966 and 1967, and by 1968 there were two a season, with NBC doing the same for AFL games. The audiences were good enough to argue with the doubters, and ABC, the weakest of the three networks at the time, took the gamble the other two would not.

September 21, 1970

The Cleveland Browns beat the New York Jets 31-21 in the first official Monday Night Football broadcast. ABC had charged advertisers 65,000 dollars a minute, which looked steep until the game pulled 33 percent of the viewing audience.

The reason it worked was Roone Arledge, who refused to televise it the way football had always been televised. He roughly doubled the number of cameras, leaned on replays and graphics, and treated the broadcast as entertainment built around a game rather than a straight relay of one. Every prime-time sports production since has borrowed from what he did that night.

The booth that made it

The original three-man booth was Keith Jackson on play-by-play with Don Meredith and Howard Cosell alongside him. Arledge was not satisfied with the chemistry, and for the 1971 season he brought in Frank Gifford from CBS to replace Jackson. That's the lineup most people remember, and Gifford stayed with the broadcast for 27 years, outlasting everyone.

Cosell is the reason the show became something other than a football game. He argued, he moralized, he got under people's skin, and a meaningful share of the audience tuned in specifically to be annoyed by him. Meredith played the opposite part. The two of them turned a Monday night into an event you talked about at work.

The night it stopped being about football

On December 8, 1980, during a game between New England and Miami, Cosell told a national audience that John Lennon had been shot and killed in New York. Millions of Americans learned about it from a football broadcast, which is as clear a demonstration as you'll find of what the show had become by then.

The football supplied its own moments. In October 1983 Green Bay beat Washington 48-47 in a game that never stopped scoring, still the standard by which people measure a Monday night shootout.

Where it sits now

The broadcast ran on ABC from 1970 through 2005, then moved to ESPN in 2006. Today it lives on both: in the 2026 season ten of the seventeen Monday games are simulcast on ABC, and the league has dropped the Monday doubleheaders that had crept into recent schedules.

Joe Buck and Troy Aikman call the main broadcast with Lisa Salters on the sideline. Peyton and Eli Manning run their alternate telecast on ESPN2, now in its sixth season, which is the closest thing the modern era has produced to what Cosell and Meredith were doing in 1971: two people talking to each other, with the game on in the background.

Collecting the Monday night era

The players who built the show's reputation are mostly retired now, which is exactly what makes their signatures behave the way they do. Supply is fixed, the careers are settled, and nothing that happens next changes the record. We explain why that matters for price in sports memorabilia versus stocks and bonds.

If you collect by era rather than by team, our signed football jerseys and signed helmets are the place to start, and the difference between a custom and a licensed jersey is worth understanding before you buy a throwback.

Featured image: Bernard Gotfryd, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons