The following article details the history of Monday Night Football , [ 1 ] the weekly broadcast of National Football League games on U. Harry Wismer [ 2 ] provided commentary for the game in and the game in joined by Red Grange and Joe Hasel.
Wire accounts found in newspaperarchive. Bob Fouts and Frankie Albert were on the commentary for 49ers games. Although for the first two weeks of the season, the roles were reversed. Less than five years later however, ABC became the initial network television partner for the American Football League.
These games were typically broadcast regionally on 15 consecutive Sundays and on Thanksgiving Day. This became the first ever cooperative television plan for professional football , in which the proceeds of the contract were divided equally among member clubs; the National Football League would follow suit in , a move that required Congress to pass the Sports Broadcasting Act of to accommodate such collective broadcasting contracts.
During the early s, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle envisioned the possibility of playing at least one game weekly during prime time that could be viewed by a greater television audience while the NFL had scheduled Saturday night games on the DuMont Television Network in and , poor ratings and the dissolution of DuMont led to those games being eliminated by the time CBS took over the rights in An early bid by the league in to play on Friday nights was soundly defeated, with critics charging that such telecasts would damage the attendance at high school football games, and in any event had been prohibited by the aforementioned Sports Broadcasting Act of for that very reason alongside Saturday games to protect college football.
Undaunted, Rozelle decided to experiment with the concept of playing on Monday night, scheduling the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions for a game on September 28, While the game was not televised, it drew a sellout crowd of 59, spectators to Tiger Stadium , the largest crowd ever to watch a professional football game in Detroit up to that point.
