Football Name: Monday Night Football

Monday Night Football is a long-running weekly broadcast of NFL (American Football) games. Debuting in 1970 on ABC, the program was conceived as both an answer to Major League Baseball's Game of the Week (and the NHL's Hockey Night in Canada) and a showcase for the best teams in the NFL, as the league traditionally uses the coveted Monday Night slot to spotlight matches between high caliber teams.

There were some Monday night games on CBS in the late 1960s as a sort of test run of the concept, but they were not played every week. Those games are not considered part of the series as such.

Monday Night Football was an instant hit in the ratings and quickly became a fixture in American pop culture. In particular, it made household names out of it's announcing team: Play-By-Play man Frank Gifford and color analysts Howard Cosell and "Dandy" Don Meredith. It also can be credited for helping make the NFL the most popular sport in the US, as the series routinely highlighted the league's top players and rivalries. It also spun off a spin-off of sorts, as ESPN (by then majority-owned by ABC) followed suit to launch Sunday Night Football in 1987.