In 1970, Roone Arledge created a live sports television broadcast program for the ages.

The American Football League and the National Football League had just completed their merger and were set to begin play as a single reconstituted league with two conferences, the American and the National. Divisions were realigned, teams were reassigned and while some old divisional rivalries were preserved, new ones were about to emerge.

After New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath backed up his bold prediction and defeated the old guard Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, football fans were eager to see what the upstart AFL teams could do against the legacy teams of the NFL.

Then-commissioner Pete Rozelle approached ABC about a Monday night Prime Time showcase for NFL football and Arledge delivered with Chet Forte as director. Keith Jackson served as play-by-play announcer alongside Howard Cosell and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback “Dandy” Don Meredith as color commentators.

The Cleveland Browns defeated the New York Jets 31-21 during the premiere of Monday Night Football on Sept. 21, 1970. Namath threw for 298 but the Browns intercepted him three times including a game-sealing Pick 6. The Detroit Lions topped the Los Angeles Rams 28-23 in the season finale on Dec. 14.

That first season featured some nailbiters and some blowouts but the product was here to stay. In 1971, Frank Gifford replaced Jackson and in a few short years, Monday Night Football became a staple of American television viewing.

Eventually Al Michaels replaced Gifford as play-by-play announcer with Gifford sliding over to the color role. Cosell left in 1983 amid some controversy after making what many believed was a racist comment. I’m not going to dive into all the announcers and broadcasting teams that have graced (or disgraced) the booth during Monday Night Football’s run. That’s a topic for another day.

Over the years, ABC’s Monday Night Football offered a cinematic chill-inducing look at NFL football. All-time performances by the game’s greats and fantastic finishes became hallmarks of Monday Night Football. Players looked forward to the showcase and reveled in the fact that the entire country was watching.

And for the first 12 years, one team reigned supreme as the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders went 19-2-1 in Prime Time on Monday night. As a lifelong Raiders fan, I used to beg my parents to extend my bedtime so I could watch the Silver and Black. As an employee, I had the privilege of attending numerous Monday night contests.

There is nothing like winning on Monday night and having everyone talk about you and only you the next day. The opening intro music became iconic, and Hank Williams, Jr. lent his talents to the intro with “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night” from 1989 until 2011 until a televised political rant got Williams booted. ESPN brought him back from 2017–2020 before dropping him for a second time.

During the second half of the 1987 schedule, ESPN’s Sunday Night Football premiered with the late-Mike Patrick as play-by-play announcer and ran until 2005. It was a venerable product and a nice companion to ABC’s.

I offer the elaborate set-up because since 2006 Monday Night Football has devolved into an almost unwatchable afterthought despite the announcing team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman.

Full disclosure. I worked for an NFL team for 20 years and I was in numerous meetings about marketing the game and growing the audience during my career.

Since the creation of the NFL Network in 2003, the league has made a concerted effort to insert NFL football into the collective consciousness year-round and turn everything on their important dates calendar into a tentpole event. From the annual scouting combine to fantasy football, the NFL wants avid fans to consume every piece of content it and its member clubs produce in the hopes casual fans become avid, and new fans find their way to the game. This is happening internationally as well as we’ve seen with the proliferation of games played in various overseas locations.

By 2006, Monday Night Football was no longer a “network” television event. It became a cable TV event with an over-the-air companion. However, the allure was still there, it was still a privilege to be scheduled on Monday Night Football. Perennial bottom dwellers complained when they went years without an appearance. Perhaps more importantly to this commentary is the fact that NBC’s Sunday Night Football premiered in 2006 and has become the signature Prime Time NFL broadcast with better matchups.

And now, with flexible scheduling, Sunday Night Football has the ability to “flex” in a better matchup as the season draws to a close and teams jockey for playoff spots.

The NFL also debuted Thursday Night Football in 2006, and unless I am mistaken or things have changed, the league has pretty much mandated that every team in the NFL gets at least a Thursday night Prime Time game to alleviate the years of heartache revolving around the lack of Prime Time appearances for [insert franchise here].

There have been various combinations of broadcast partners including CBS and FOX for the Thursday night package, which now streams exclusively on Amazon Prime. These entities combine for special Saturday games, especially late in the season, and Thanksgiving, Christmas and playoff game broadcasts.

What triggered this rant is the “doubleheader” model that ABC/ESPN has foisted on the football viewing public. From 2006 to 2020, the doubleheader was played on the opening Monday night of the season. Since then the doubleheader in many cases has become a misnomer with simultaneous broadcasts with staggered start times. Rarely do both games air back-to-back on both ABC and ESPN. And this season the concept ran all the way through Week 7. Weeks 1, 2 and 5 only had one MNF game.

Sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing. NFL football has supplanted baseball as America’s favorite pastime and in today’s day and age of streaming video and DVRs with seemingly limitless capacity, appointment television has gone the way of the dodo. And yes, you do have the option, in most cases, to record the other game if you want to watch both.

But this GenXer grew up in the halcyon days before VCRs and internet streaming when television could be and was an event. I didn’t get cable TV until I was 11. If you missed a show, a movie, a special news report, a Christmas special, or a game, oh well.

But today, in 2025, there is too much choice, too many options and it’s overwhelming. Not everyone has all the streaming services you need to watch all the games or the whatevers, or can afford them, let alone the high speed internet.

Don’t get me wrong, I love internet streaming, I really do. But some things are sacred. We would work or go to school all week, watch college on Saturday, the actual NFL doubleheader on Sunday, went back to work/school on Monday and came home to one more pro football game after talking about it all day.

The opponents didn’t matter. You knew it was going to be a good game that meant something. It was the perfect cap to the weekend and kickoff to the next week. One game. Two teams. A national television audience. Prime Time.

You settled in wherever and with whomever you watched football and got chills when you heard the theme music, and Frank Gifford set the scene …

“… on ABC’s Monday Night Football!”

Jerry Knaak is a reporter for The Daily World.