Monday Night Football born in Cleveland 50 years ago today
Watch the 1st ever MNF Game here
By STEVE KING
The story has been well-told here on Browns Daily Dose, and other places as well, but because of the significance of this date, it bears repeating.
It was exactly 50 years ago today, on Sept. 21, 1970, that Monday Night Football was born at Cleveland Stadium. The Browns opened the season by defeating the New York Jets 31-21 on a hot, steamy night as summer gave way to fall in front of 85,703, the largest crowd ever to see a Browns game in Cleveland.
Sept. 21, 1970, Monday Night Football premiered on ABC. It would go on to dramatically influence sports and pop-culture landscapes of America.
— Vuuzle.TV (@vuuzle_tv) September 14, 2020
Say what you want about then Browns owner Art Modell — and we all certainly have — but you have to give him credit for the fact he had a keen eye for what people would like and he was not shy about trying new ideas to get their attention. As such, he volunteered his team to play in the first MNF game, and he volunteered his stadium to host it.
This — 1970 — was the first season after the finalization of the NFL-AFL merger, and as such the new NFL was open to innovations, including MNF. But because the league had played its regular-season games solely on Sunday afternoons for decades, it was unknown if anyone — anyone at all — would be interested in watching the national telecast of pro football on a weekday evening. Would it be a boom or a bust? No one could say for sure, but Modell, with his extensive TV background and a real understanding of the potential of NFL game telecasts, was betting that fans would love it. Other TV-intensive people weren’t so sure, however, which is why less than half — less than half! — of the ABC affiliates picked up the network’s telecast of Browns-Jets. The majority showed ABC’s regular Monday night fall TV lineup.
If the game were a ratings flop, then the NFL and ABC would be in real trouble, for there would be 13 more MNF contests — one for each of the remaining weeks of the regular season. Having a string of lemons like that would have been an unmitigated disaster, both in rating and PR, but it didn’t turn out that way, for, just as Modell thought would happen, in the markets where the game was aired, the ratings were off the charts. It didn’t hurt that the game itself provided a perfect storm, for in a match-up of two of the most high-profile teams in the league then, the Browns clinched the win in the final minute when linebacker Billy Andrews intercepted a Joe Namath pass and returned it for a touchdown. It was a thrilling climax to what had been an exciting game throughout before a large, raucous crowd.
When it was all said and done, a more perfect script with which to launch MNF could not have been written.
That was a long time ago, a full half-century, in fact. The present-day Browns need to get back to that type of thing, taking the lead both literally and figuratively on a big national stage and setting the standard for the rest of the NFL.
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