The NFL on Fox (also known as Fox NFL) is an American presentation of the National Football League (NFL) games produced by Fox Sports, and televised on the Fox television network and streaming service Fox One.
Game coverage is usually preceded by Fox NFL Kickoff and Fox NFL Sunday and is followed on weeks when the network airs a Doubleheader by The OT. The latter two shows feature the same studio hosts and analysts for both programs, who also contribute to the former. In weeks when Fox airs a doubleheader, the late broadcast (which airs nationwide in nearly all markets, there typically being only one to three games taking place at the time) airs under the brand America's Game of the Week, frequently featuring the Dallas Cowboys due to their national appeal.
Fox aired its inaugural NFL game telecast on August 12, 1994, with a preseason game between the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Coverage formally began the following month on September 4, with the premiere of Fox NFL Sunday, followed by a slate of six regionally televised regular season games on the first Sunday of the 1994 season.
History Though Fox was growing rapidly as a network, and had established itself as a presence, it was still not considered a major competitor to the more established "Big Three" broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). Fox management, having seen the critical role that soccer programming had played in the growth of British satellite service BSkyB, believed that sports, and specifically professional football, would be the engine that would turn Fox into a major network the quickest.
Early bids To this end, Fox had bid aggressively for football broadcast rights almost from the start. It notably passed on the original United States Football League (USFL), which had hoped to move to the fall in 1986, the same time Fox was to debut, and was seeking a broadcast contract; the USFL would shut down instead. In 1987, Fox's first full year on the air, ABC initially hedged on renewing its contract to carry Monday Night Football – then the league's crown-jewel program – and was in the middle of negotiations to reach a new contract, due to an increased expense of the rights. Fox made an offer to the NFL to acquire the Monday Night Football contract for the same amount ABC that had been paying to carry the package, about US$1.3 billion at the time. However, the NFL, in part because Fox had not yet established itself as a major network, chose to renew its contract with ABC.
Meanwhile, after the Fox Broadcasting Company was launched, David Dixon, founder of the above-mentioned USFL, proposed the creation of the "American Football Federation", a spring league that would be made up of ten teams and draft high school graduates who were declared academically ineligible to play College Football by the NCAA."New spring football league seeks TV deal", Pacific Stars and Stripes, January 11, 1965, p. 25 The proposed league never came to fruition.
Despite having a few successful shows in its slate and scoring a major coup when longtime NBC affiliate WSVN in Miami switched to Fox in 1989 after NBC bought longtime CBS affiliate WTVJ, Fox did not have a significant market share until the early 1990s when Fox parent News Corporation (which became 21st Century Fox through the July 2013 spin-off of its publishing unit, now the current News Corp.) began to upgrade some of its local affiliates – and eventually purchased additional stations from other television station groups, such as New World Communications and Chris-Craft Industries' BHC Communications and United Television, making it the largest owner of television stations in the United States. The time now filled by NFL on Fox on Sunday afternoons during the fall and winter months was formerly in the control of the stations themselves (and still is to some extent outside of the NFL season, particularly during weeks when no sports programming is scheduled at all by Fox, as well as on non-doubleheader weeks during the season or in home markets when a competing channel is airing a home game cancelling a doubleheader on Fox stations in those areas), which usually filled the timeslots with either syndicated television series (both first-run and off-network) and/or movie blocks. The Sunday afternoon timeslot in the spring is filled by NASCAR on Fox coverage of the NASCAR Cup Series.
Fox outbids CBS for the NFC package Six years after its first attempt, the league's television contracts for both conferences and for the Sunday and Monday prime time football packages came up for renewal again in 1993.
Many expected that the NFL would receive less money than the $3.6 billion for four years that ABC, CBS, NBC, TNT, and ESPN had paid in 1990. Fox wanted the NFL to build credibility for itself; even those working in television thought of it as "the one that has that cartoon show" (The Simpsons). More than 85% of affiliates were UHF stations. Knowing that it would likely need to bid considerably more than the incumbent networks, Fox bid $1.58 billion to obtain a four-year contract for the broadcast rights to the National Football Conference (NFC), exceeding CBS's bid by more than $100 million per year. The NFC was considered the more desirable conference than the American Football Conference (AFC), whose television package was being carried at the time by NBC, due to the NFC's presence in most of the largest U.S. markets, such as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas, the last of which was gaining a national following in the 1990s. Fox also caught CBS at an inopportune time, as the network was in a distant third in the ratings at the time and was going under cost-cutting measures under Laurence Tisch (whose family co-owns the New York Giants) that would eventually lead to its sale to Westinghouse Broadcasting in 1995.
Despite so much skepticism that Fox had to assure the NFL and media that Bart Simpson would not be an announcer, to the surprise of many in the sports and media industries, on December 17, 1993, the NFL selected the bid offered by Fox, stripping CBS of football for the first time since 1956. Fox's coverage, in addition to being able to televise NFC regular season and playoff games, also included the exclusive U.S. television rights to Super Bowl XXXI (held in 1997) under the initial contract, which took effect with the 1994 season.
The unexpectedly high bids from Fox and other networks increased the NFL salary cap, new in 1994, to $34 million from the predicted $32 million. Tisch had apparently underestimated the value of its NFL rights with respect to its advertising revenues and to its promotional opportunities for other programming on the network. Indeed, Fox was still an upstart player in 1993, not yet considered on par with CBS, NBC and ABC, the three longer established major networks (Fox, by comparison, had debuted in October 1986 as the only venture at a fourth television network since the 1956 demise of the DuMont Television Network to truly compete with the "Big Three"). The network already had offbeat hits such as The Simpsons, Married... with Children, and Beverly Hills, 90210 on its schedule. However, Fox did not have a sports division up to that point, and its news division was a few years away from fruition (most Fox stations outside of a few owned by the network did not even produce their own news programming), and most Fox affiliates were often either full-power UHF stations or low-powered stations. In addition, there were some smaller markets that were not yet served by a local Fox affiliate; back in 1991, the Foxnet cable channel began operations to provide the network's programming to those areas until a new over-the-air affiliate was made available.
CBS personalities move to Fox and major affiliation switches
John Madden joked when he joined the network that it should be called Fox Sport, "because the only sport we had at Fox was football, NFL football", but Rupert Murdoch's vast resources allowed the network to grow quickly, primarily to the detriment of CBS. After bringing in David Hill from Murdoch's U.K.-based Sky Sports to head-up the new Fox Sports division, Fox began luring over members of the CBS Sports staff, hiring longtime producer Ed Goren as Hill's second-in-command. Fox was also able to procure Pat Summerall and Madden to be its lead broadcast team, a capacity they had been serving for CBS. Terry Bradshaw, who was previously co-host of The NFL Today, was added to serve as the pregame show's lead analyst. Dick Stockton and Matt Millen also came over from CBS and became the network's #2 broadcast team, while James Brown, who had called play-by-play for CBS' game telecasts, was hired to be the studio host.
Fox also hired a set of the next generation of young, up-and-coming play-by-play announcers for its lower-level broadcast crews: 26-year-old Kenny Albert, son of legendary sports announcer Marv Albert; 30-year-old Thom Brennaman, son of longtime Cincinnati Reds announcer Marty Brennaman; 25-year-old Joe Buck, son of legendary sports announcer Jack Buck; and 34-year-old Kevin Harlan, son of Green Bay Packers executive Bob Harlan.
Fox sought to raise its station profile as the start of its NFL contract came closer by approaching other broadcasters about switching their VHF stations (channels 2 to 13) to the network from one of the other established networks. On May 23, 1994, News Corporation struck an alliance with New World Communications, a television and film production company that by now was a key station group with several VHF CBS affiliates in NFC markets in its portfolio, and wary of a CBS without football. Through the deal, in which also Fox purchased a 20% interest in the company, nearly all of New World's stations (including several that the company was in the process of acquiring from Citicasters and Argyle Communications at the time the deal was struck) switched en masse to Fox beginning that September and continuing through September 1996 as existing affiliation contracts with their previous network partners came to an end (network subsidiary Fox Television Stations bought New World Communications outright in July 1996).
In the summer of 1994, SF Broadcasting (a recently formed joint venture between Fox and Savoy Pictures) purchased four stations from Burnham Broadcasting, which also became Fox affiliates between September 1995 and January 1996. In the NFC markets affected by the deals, Fox gained VHF affiliates in eight primary markets (Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Green Bay, New Orleans, Phoenix, St. Louis and Tampa) and three satellite markets (Austin, Greensboro and Milwaukee), adding to the four that the network had before the deal. The new affiliates in St. Louis and Greensboro switched shortly before the Rams relocated from Los Angeles and the Carolina Panthers began play with the 1995 preseason. Besides giving the network leverage in attracting new affiliates, the rights gave Fox many new viewers and a platform for advertising its other shows.