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Monday Night Football (view source)

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[[File:monday_night_football.jpg|frame|Are you ready for some football?]]
 
'''''Monday Night Football''''' is a [[Long Runner|long-running]] weekly broadcast of NFL ([[American Football]]) games. Debuting in 1970 on [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]], the program was conceived as both an answer to Major League Baseball's ''Game of the Week'' (and the NHL's ''[[Hockey Night in Canada]]'') and a showcase for the best teams in the NFL, as the league traditionally uses the coveted ''Monday Night'' slot to spotlight matches between high caliber teams.
 
There were some Monday night games on [[CBS]] in the late 1960s as a sort of test run of the concept, but they were not played every week. Those games are not considered part of the series as such.
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''Monday Night Football'' was an instant hit in the ratings and quickly became a fixture in American pop culture. In particular, it made household names out of it's announcing team: Play-By-Play man Frank Gifford and color analysts Howard Cosell and "Dandy" Don Meredith. It also can be credited for helping make the NFL the most popular sport in the US, as the series routinely highlighted the league's top players and rivalries. It also spun off a spin-off of sorts, as [[ESPN]] (by then majority-owned by ABC) followed suit to launch ''Sunday Night Football'' in 1987.
 
Sadly, things changed when in 2005 when [[Walt Disney|Disney]] (who by that time owned both ABC and ESPN) decided that declining ratings (exacerbated by the popularity of pro wrestling's ''[[WCW]] Monday Nitro'' and ''[[WWEWorld Wrestling Entertainment|WWF]] [[WWE Raw|Monday Night Raw]]'') and escalating TV contracts no longer made the series profitable enough for ABC to keep. A large part of the problem was that competitive balance had become a problem for the schedule makers as the top teams from the previous season might no longer be so the next season. This resulted in late-season match-ups that were clunkers because one or the other of the teams were no longer a playoff contender, making the Monday night game less appealing to a mass audience. ABC also ended up with a [[Friday Night Death Slot|death slot]] before the game after ''[[MacGyver]]'' was canceled as no show could recapture the perfect chemistry of Richard Dean Anderson's iconic character leading into ''MNF'', and as many local affiliates figured that out and pre-empted whatever was before the game with a local football show, was stuck airing ''20/20 Downtown'' to complete viewer apathy.
 
ABC, among other entities, tried to get the NFL to agree to a concept that would eventually become known as "flex scheduling," which would be invoked when needed to replace a poor match-up with a better one. The idea was deemed impractical because of the logistics involved in moving a Sunday afternoon game to Monday night.
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