Post by TheShadow on Aug 4, 2006 7:22:13 GMT -5
www.thestate.com/
By DOUG NYE
On the Air
It's time to welcome back NBC.
After an eight-year absence, the network is back in business with the National Football League. Although the regular season is a month away, the first rehearsal for NBC’s "Sunday Night Football" package will be 8 p.m. Sunday with the Hall of Fame game from Canton, Ohio.
Al Michaels and John Madden will be in the booth to call the action between the Oakland Raiders and Philadelphia Eagles.
NBC and the NFL are a prefect fit because they have a lengthy history together that dates to 1939. That is the year NBC televised the first live NFL game, featuring the Philadelphia Eagles and Brooklyn Dodgers.
The first color broadcast of an NFL Championship Game was done by NBC in 1960, when the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Green Bay Packers 17-13.
NBC also telecast arguably the two most significant NFL games. The first was the 1958 Championship Game, in which the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants 23-17 in pro football's first sudden-death overtime. That game, often called "the greatest ever played," is credited with boosting interest in pro football.
And NBC televised Super Bowl III on Jan. 12, 1969, in Miami, when the New York Jets of the American Football League stunned the Baltimore Colts of the NFL 16-7. At the time, the NFL was regarded as far superior to the upstart AFL, which was nine years old. The Colts entered as 20-point favorites, but that didn’t stop Jets quarterback Joe Namath from guaranteeing a victory.
The Jets' triumph gained respect for AFL teams. The two leagues merged under the NFL banner in 1970 season.
It is also worth noting that without NBC, there might not be a Super Bowl. Although NBC had rights to the NFL Championship Game through 1962, CBS had rights to regular-season games. Tired of seeing CBS dominate Sunday afternoons, NBC approached the AFL and struck a multimillion dollar deal to televise the league's games, beginning with the 1965 season.
The AFL, founded in 1960, was struggling, and its games previously had been televised by ABC, which also was struggling and had a much smaller national audience than NBC. Many historians think the $32 million NBC paid for the rights rescued the AFL and helped force the merger. That gave birth to the AFL-NFL Championship Game, which soon became known as the Super Bowl.
For the next three decades, NBC was the regular-season home of the AFC. In 1998, CBS, strung by losing the NFC to FOX four years earlier, outbid NBC for the AFC package. During the ensuing eight years, NBC tried to fill the void with the short-lived XFL and withArena Football.
The only good thing about that was NBC realized how much it missed the NFL.
Welcome back, NBC.
