Ben Gilbert

This notion you're actually tuning into a program that has an associated pump-up song that is built for that franchise is unique.

Okay, so let's talk about highlights.

So how could you have possibly watched highlights before Monday Night Football?

Well, the games were on Sundays, and that was really the only football that was on all week.

We didn't have the internet.

There wasn't ESPN.

There wasn't SportsCenter.

So there really was no place to go and watch highlights.

Now, football and all sports are unbelievably highlightable events.

that if you string together a bunch of the very best plays, it's really, really interesting and really entertaining, especially if they're covered by great cameras.

Now, compare this to baseball, where not only was there no place to go watch them, but there was no one capturing them.

footage to even highlight it.

But NFL has NFL Films, and using high-quality cameras and film stock, they are capturing great camera angles of every game.

And so between Sunday and Monday, the NFL Films team would go and take all of the footage from the game the previous day, cut up a highlight reel, and as soon as possible, get that to whatever city the Monday Night Football broadcast was happening in so that they could play it

at halftime.

And Howard Cosell could give his commentary, often having never seen the footage while the highlight reel is playing in the background, and really invents this idea of, for the first time, we're going to watch highlights of yesterday's games.

Totally.

All within 24 hours.

It's really amazing.

God, I can't believe we're only up to 1970.