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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 ''[[
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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