MNF's 'Halftime Highlights' changed football on TV forever
Never before had viewers been taken on such a wild NFL ride until ABC and Howard Cosell arrived on the scene on Monday nights.
Before ABC started beaming NFL games into the nation’s living rooms on Monday nights, halftime was when the football viewers on Sundays could take time to relieve themselves, grab a snack or let the dog out. That soon changed.
We’re coming up on the 54th anniversary of the very first edition of “Monday Night Football” (Sept. 21, 1970) and it’s time to reflect.
The league and ABC get credit, for sure, for leveraging pro football’s skyrocketing popularity on Sundays into a prime time ratings bonanza on Monday nights.
But I don’t think even the network knew what genie they let out of the bottle when they commissioned Howard Cosell to voice over the “halftime highlights.”
Using edited footage of the previous day’s action from NFL Films, Cosell sat in the broadcast booth of whichever stadium he was in that Monday afternoon and, often in one take, took viewers on a breathless tour of the league’s games—in rat-a-tat-tat fashion.
Instead of canned music, the background audio consisted of generic crowd sounds as Cosell watched the highlights on a tiny monitor and went to work.
“Second half action, Denver trailing 14-10…then THIS! Running back Floyd Little, he of Syracuse University! Twenty-FIVE yards up the middle to set up a Denver field goal.”
Almost immediately, the halftime highlights show became an entity in and of itself. It was “must see TV.” It became so popular that in order to relieve millions of bladders across the country, ABC split the highlights show into two parts, separated by commercials.
But it didn’t take long for the halftime highlights to take a dark turn.
There was a finite amount of time to shoehorn highlights from 12 NFL games (not including the Monday night game, obviously) into halftime. So that meant that each week, some teams would be left out.
I remember as a child being allowed to stay up until the halftime highlights were over with, and if the Lions weren’t included in the package (which was too often), I brooded and stomped to my bedroom, disgusted.
Eventually, ABC received thousands of angry calls and letters from fans whose teams weren’t featured regularly at halftime.
Producer Don Ohlmeyer had a solution for that.
“We would tell the angry viewers that Howard (Cosell) picked the games for the highlights,” Ohlmeyer said in a 1990s documentary about the history of sports on television. “And if they had a complaint, to direct them at Howard.
“Of course that wasn’t true. Howard had nothing to do with it,” Ohlmeyer laughed.
But joking aside, the MNF halftime highlights were indeed a big point of contention among fans. Seeing your team get those precious 90 seconds or so of film with Cosell talking about the players who were your heroes, was scintillating.
It’s not an embellishment to say that ABC’s “halftime highlights” feature remains the granddaddy of all football highlights packages—whether they be on Sunday morning, Monday night or Thursday night and no matter the network.
Oh, the NFL showed highlights of their games on television and in movie houses long before MNF became a thing, but never before the way Cosell and ABC showed them.
Before, the highlights were of a single “Game of the Week,” stretched into a 25-minute block and shown in syndication across the country. The narration was slower and more casual. There were long pauses between words.
But Howard Cosell motored through 8-10 games each week, within a 15-minute block of time. There was hardly any dead air.
What was remarkable about Cosell’s narration was that he often voiced the highlights while seeing the footage on the monitor for the first time. He was provided with notes that explained what plays he was going to see and the players involved, but as far as actually seeing the action unfold, he didn’t use any advanced screenings.
That was because there simply wasn’t a lot of time.
NFL Films used actual film, which had to be developed on Sunday night or Monday morning. Then it had to be spliced and sent to wherever ABC was on that particular Monday. It was a different time.
Cosell would typically sit in the booth in late-afternoon, early-evening—just hours before that night’s game and fire up his pipes.
The whole thing was recorded for playback during that game’s halftime. Pretty frantic stuff.
MNF’s “halftime highlights” show ended football viewers’ routine behavior at intermission. You can still find dozens of such clips on YouTube, thank goodness.
It was pulsating and I sure do miss it.