NBC’s ‘Sunday Night Football’ celebrates 20 years of prime-time dominance

By JOE REEDY
AP Sports Writer

Dick Ebersol helped change comedy and late-night television when he teamed up with Lorne Michaels to create “Saturday Night Live” in 1975.

When it comes to sports television, Ebersol’s creation of “Sunday Night Football” on NBC in 2006 also has had a significant impact.

It is fitting then that both are celebrating milestones this year. “Saturday Night Live” celebrated its 50th season in February, while “Sunday Night Football” is in its 20th season.

“We were really aware that we weren’t just doing a football game, we were doing an important football game, that we would have all the bells and whistles,” Ebersol said about “Sunday Night Football” before accepting the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2019.

This week’s game is a full-circle moment as the New York Giants host the Kansas City Chiefs. SNF began at the Meadowlands complex in 2006 with the “Manning Bowl,” when Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts faced younger brother Eli and the Giants.

“Sunday Night Football” has been the highest-rated prime-time show for 14 consecutive seasons. The next closest was “American Idol”, which had a six-year streak from 2005-06 to the 2010-11 television season.

NBC’s first three games this season — including the Sept. 4 NFL Kickoff game — are averaging 24.9 million viewers for its best start since 2015.

The Sunday night package put NBC back in the NFL. NBC was without pro football for eight seasons, from 1998 to 2005, after CBS took over the AFC package.

The late Pat Bowlen, who owned the Denver Broncos and chaired the NFL’s broadcast committee, called Ebersol in 2004 to gauge his interest.

“I think it’s exceeded everyone’s even very high expectations going in, and they’ve gone through the roof,” said Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution. “They’ve really never stopped innovating and focused on how to make Sunday night feel like a huge event and a great way to end the day.”

Mike Tirico called “Monday Night Football” on ESPN from 2006 through ’15 before joining NBC in 2016. He was the host of “Football Night in America” until taking over as the play-by-play announcer from Al Michaels in 2022.

Cris Collinsworth, who got his start at NBC after retiring as a player, returned to the network in 2006. He was on the studio show for three years before moving into the booth in 2009 after John Madden’s retirement.

Even though MNF had a 35-plus-year head start as the NFL’s seminal prime-time package, Tirico said it didn’t take long for SNF to supplant it because of the matchups and feel of the broadcast.

“I think ‘Sunday Night Football’ has become everything ‘Monday Night Football’ was and more now in a much more saturated TV environment,” Tirico said. “So I think without Monday night, you don’t have what Sunday night has, but it took a special group of people, great planning and purpose to get Sunday night to where it is now. This run of being the No. 1 show in prime-time television for almost a decade and a half now, that’s extraordinary.”

Fred Gaudelli, who produced “Sunday Night Football” from 2006 through 2022 after working on “Monday Night Football” for five years, said the success of Sunday night’s package at the start was due to Ebersol’s constant attention to the game schedule.

“There’s never been a network president, I’m very confident in saying this, that made the schedule a bigger priority than Dick Ebersol did,” said Gaudelli, the executive producer for the past three seasons. “If you check our schedules like the first five or six years, I think we had (Tom) Brady versus (Peyton) Manning four of the five times, and we had all the big Cowboys games. So all of a sudden, every Sunday night is a big game. Monday night was ingrained in the American culture, but literally within two or three years, we had reversed it.”

Something that Gaudelli sold Ebersol on, though, was having a musical open to the show, especially when Gaudelli mentioned how much NBC could earn from having a sponsor.

Gaudelli went to his iPod, heard Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” and started to come up with lyrics that have been a staple of the show. Pink performed “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” before it switched to Faith Hill and now Carrie Underwood.

“I’ve had a front-row seat as the team created a sports presentation that went far beyond sports, with the integration of storytelling, pop culture and a musical show open that has become iconic,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said.

Sunday night also introduced flex scheduling, allowing a less-appealing matchup late in the season to be swapped for a better game with at least 12 days’ notice. The only exception is the final week of the regular season, when the matchup is set one week out to ensure the final game has playoff implications.

Flex scheduling has expanded to Monday and Thursday nights.

Even though Ebersol left as president of NBC Sports in 2011, many of his innovations and attention to storytelling still resonate.

“I had been at NBC for almost 10 years prior to starting on ‘Sunday Night Football’. You do a good show, get a pat on the back and move on to the next show,” said Rob Hyland, the coordinating producer of SNF. “This was so different in that we basically did forensics on our presentation each week, during the season, during the offseason, and it really helped me learn that the standard for this show, even from Day 1, was going to be different than anything I’d ever worked on.

“Nothing has changed in terms of that standard. It’s only gotten higher.”

NBC has aired Sunday night games from 40 stadiums, with Dallas playing in the most games in the series at 61. The most-viewed game was the 2012 season finale between the Cowboys and Washington, which averaged 30.3 million.

Andy Reid will coach in his 50th Sunday night game this week.

Even though the original Giants Stadium, where the Manning Bowl took place, is now a parking lot, its successor has had a couple of Sunday night moments since opening in 2010. That included Odell Beckham Jr.’s one-handed grab when the Giants took on the Cowboys in 2014.

“You go back to Dick Ebersol one more time, for him to create that kind of late relationship with the league and understand that more eyeballs were naturally on Sunday night anyway, that if they just put better games and better teams there, that they could end up with the No. 1 television show, which no sports program had ever been the No. 1 show,” Collinsworth said. “It was a great collaboration. It was the NFL stepping back and going, ‘Oh, never thought about that.’ And Dick making the point.”

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