NFL on FOX: Encyclopedia II - NFL on FOX - History

NFL on FOX - 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 "big three" broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). Fox management, having seen the critical role that sports programming (football programming in particular) had played in the growth of satellite service BSkyB, believed that sports, and specifically professional football, would be the engine that would make Fox a major network the quickest.

To this end, Fox bid aggressively for football from the start. In 1987 (Fox's first full year on the air), after ABC initially hedged on renewing its contract to carry Monday Night Football, Fox offered the NFL to pick up the contract for the same amount ABC had been paying, about $13 million per game at the time. However, the NFL, in part because Fox had not established itself as a major network, chose to renew their contract with ABC.

Despite a few successful shows, the network did not have a significant market share until the early 1990s when News Corp. bought more TV station groups, such as New World Communications, Chris-Craft Industries, BHC Communications, and United Television, making it the largest owner of television stations in the United States.

Six years later, when the football contract was up for renewal again, Fox made what at the time was a bold and aggressive move to acquire the rights. Knowing that they would likely need to bid considerably more than the incumbent networks to acquire a piece of the package, Fox bid $1.58 billion for 4 years of rights to the NFC, considered the more desirable conference due to its presence in most of the largest U.S. markets, such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. To the surprise and shock of many, in late 1993, the NFL selected the Fox bid, in the process stripping CBS of football for the first time since 1952. Fox's coverage would start in the 1994 season.

CBS apparently underestimated the value of its rights with respect to its advertising revenues and to its promotional opportunities for other network programming. Indeed, Fox was still an upstart player in 1993, not yet considered on par with the "Big Three" networks - CBS, NBC and ABC. It had already had offbeat hits such as The Simpsons, but had no news or sports divisions, and its coverage was significantly weaker than that of its elder counterparts.

However, the vast resources of Rupert Murdoch 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 raided the CBS Sports staff, hiring longtime producer Ed Goren as Hill's second-in-command, plus CBS personalities such as Pat Summerall, John Madden, James Brown, Terry Bradshaw, and Dick Stockton, all of whom were prominently featured in Fox's NFL coverage. In spring 1994, Fox's parent News Corporation struck an alliance with New World Communications, by now a key ownership group with several VHF CBS affiliates in NFC markets, and wary of a CBS without football. Nearly all of New World's stations converted en masse to Fox beginning that fall. The rights gave Fox many new viewers (and affiliates) and a platform for advertising its other shows.

Fox's acquisition of football was a watershed event not only for the network but for the NFL as well. Not only was it the event that placed Fox on a par with the "big three" broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) but it also ushered in an era of growth for the NFL which continues on largely to this day.

While the heavy concentration of population in NFC markets - as opposed to the smaller markets generally served by the AFC - virtually guaranteed a substantial audience, its instant success has nonetheless been remarkable given the substantial differences between Fox's coverage and the coverage provided by ABC, CBS, and NBC up to that time.

Fox's launch slogan was "Same Game, New Attitude." Indeed, its studio show focused more on entertainment and less on in-depth discussion of X's and O's. It also introduced bolder and innovative graphics, for instance, a continuous on-screen time-and-score graphic that Hill had originally used on Sky's soccer coverage. And it made much greater use of the sounds in the stands and on the field thanks to parabolic microphones. These innovations were quickly adopted by rival networks and helped to drive the development of further innovations such as the virtual first-down line.

In its debut in the 1994 season, Fox's coverage featured the first "Scoring Bug". A transparent white graphic in the upper corner of the screen displayed the score and game clock throughout the entire telecast, an NFL first. By 1996, the graphic changed to a full-statistics panel, where down and distance, penalty, and key in-game statistics would pop in and out when necessary. Within a couple years, the scoring bug became a staple on all sports broadcasts, on all networks, though NBC still took many more years to get a bug into any sports broadcast, and many tennis broadcasts still do not use a scoring bug. In 2001, the graphic changed from a bug to a banner spanning the top of the screen, and included a scrolling graphic displaying real-time scores of other games in progress.

Fox's NFL coverage remains the most-watched of any of the NFL rightsholders, with ratings for the network's 4:15 p.m. ET games frequently surpassing even those of the venerable Monday Night Football.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki