By Staff
This next era with an earlier 8:30 start will be, in the words of “Monday Night Mayhem” co-author Bill Carter, simply “football on Monday night.”
The new John Madden will be former Notre Dame and Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, who had his leg spectacularly broken on MNF by New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor on Nov. 20, 1985.
It won't be a big, once-a-week national event, just another niche in an endless cavalcade of televised games when it's demoted to ESPN cable for the 2006 season.
NBC will return to the NFL broadcast team with Sunday night games.
The challenge of uniting audiences around a single sporting event is daunting enough without deciding months in advance which matchups might be worthy of a marquee game down the road.
In pre-Internet America on Dec. 8, 1980, it fell to bombastic Howard Cosell to announce to a shocked nation John Lennon's assassination.
Cosell's pomposity made it routinely sound as if he was describing Armageddon, but he was leavened by another character in the booth, “Dandy” Don Meredith, the folksy former Dallas Cowboys quarterback.
The Cowboys and Miami Dolphins tied for MNF wins, 39.
The highest-rated game ever, 29.6 percent, was Dec. 2, 1985, when the Dolphins stopped the Super Bowl Shuffle, ending the Chicago Bears' 12-0 season-opening streak with a 38-24 upset.
Their chemistry with Frank Gifford overshadowed the action on the field and was validated by a less-successful 2000 experiment adding comedian Dennis Miller to the mix.
Sportscasting may look easy, but reading fake news on “Saturday Night Live” doesn't necessarily make you ready for prime time. O.J. Simpson shared the booth from 1983-85.
Meredith taped a rendition of “The Party's Over,” his signature song he crooned during blowouts, for tonight.
Some credit Roone Arledge's and Chet Forte's blend of sports and entertainment for creating the first reality show.
So influential was the show that Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter rescheduled their 1980 presidential debate around “Monday Night Football.”
Ratings peaked at 21.7 in 1981, compared to a paltry 10.9 this season.
The trend that did in “Monday Night Football” is the proliferation of TV sports.
This trend gave us a new national pastime, couch-sitting.
New Census Bureau statistics bear out our sedentary lifestyles.
Watching televised sports and attending professional athletic events are both on the rise (hockey, 8.1 percent; baseball, 7.6 percent; basketball, 5.5 percent), but participation in skiing, golf and tennis declined from 2003 to 2004.
At the same time, a fitness study by Northwestern University health researchers concludes a third of U.S. teens would fail a treadmill fitness test.
Seven million youths ages 12 to 19 should be at the peak of their physical prowess - not taking their recreation sitting down. That's a party that should be over.