King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Sunday night is the new Monday night in the NFL's latest TV deal. We may be in the dying days of NFL games being mostly broadcast for free.

Read more: Sports, CBS, TV, NBC, ABC, FOX, News, Football, NFL, Salon News, King Kaufman, Sports Daily

April 19, 2005 | It's all Dennis Miller's fault.

Ask yourself: Would ABC have lost "Monday Night Football" if not for the failed Dennis Miller experiment a few years ago?

The answer, of course, is yes. But it's still his fault.

The Monday night franchise is moving down the Disney hall from ABC to ESPN in 2006 in a deal announced Monday. The NFL also announced that the Sunday night game, a franchise established by ESPN, would be taken over by NBC, which is getting back into the NFL business for the first time since 1997.

It's also a return to big-time, non-Olympic sports for NBC, which has occupied itself these last few years with arena football, rodeo, frog jumping, seed spitting, bird calling and other sports unburdened by huge rights fees or large groups of viewers. Before this, the Peacock's biggest sports deal in years was an agreement to broadcast the NHL, a league that, not to put too fine a point on it, does not exist.

Monday's deal marks the end of one of the longest traditions in this little traditionless world of sports and TV and sports TV that some of us live in. The Monday night game on ABC dates to 1970, a long-ago time of low-top shoes, low-tech graphics and the low-grade toupee that perched on the head of Howard Cosell.

I'm confident ABC will remind us of these things often between August and January, but "Monday Night Football" has given us Cosell and the halftime highlights, Dandy Don Meredith and "Turn out the lights, the party's over," that four-note opening fanfare, Frank Gifford's amiable airheadedness, and a slew of yellow jackets tromping through the booth and leaving little in the way of memories: Alex Karras, Fred Williamson, Joe Namath, Dan Fouts.

And in recent years, in the Al Michaels-John Madden era, it's given us increasingly desperate moves to stay relevant, hip and interesting in the face of ratings that were falling but still pretty damn good.

These gambits are better left to the dustbin of history, but just to give you a flavor, consider that ABC actually thought at one point that it would somehow be good for someone, somewhere, if it showed several minutes of Lions quarterback Joey Harrington playing the piano.

It's a little sad, I suppose, that this way of life, the football game on ABC Monday nights, is coming to an end. I suspect that if you're reading this, you probably have basic cable and the big difference between your autumn nights in 2005 and 2006 will come down to the numbers you punch into the remote.

But make no mistake, fewer people will be watching football on Monday nights after this season. And the NFL will make twice as much money on them. This little shift could be a preview of a big shift to come.

Next page: Turn out the lights on over-the-air NFL games? The real money's in scarcity