30 years ago today, the NFL announced Fox had won NFC broadcasting rights

To anyone under 40, watching games on Fox is engrained in the weekly NFL experience.

To those of us old enough to remember the lay of the TV land in 1993, it might seem impossible to explain to younger generations just how unthinkable the idea of NFL football on Fox was at the time.

While some might compare it to the recent wave of streaming services snagging broadcasting rights, it’s less like Amazon getting an NFL game and more like if Twitch became the new home of Monday Night Football.

So, on December 17, 1993, when the NFL announced that it had selected Fox’s $1.58 billion bid for NFC games, it felt like a seismic shift in our understanding of the American television landscape.

“When I was a kid, Fox was kind of a backwater television network,” wrote Allen Kenney for Awful Announcing in 2016, “It aired something like seven original shows that I can recall off the top of my head.” Namechecking The Simpsons, Married…With Children, In Living Color, and Beverly Hills 90210, the implication was that while Fox had a few hits here and there, it was still very much the “other” network aside from NBC, ABC, and CBS.

Another thing those three networks had in common was the NFL, with NBC owning AFC rights, CBS owning NFC rights, and ABC owning Monday Night Football. Fox had always bid aggressively for football broadcast rights as owner Rupert Murdoch seemed to understand how important the NFL was as a foothold into American television sets. In 1993, when the NFC rights were up for renewal, Fox surprised everyone with a bid that exceeded CBS’s by over $100 million per year (CBS had paid $1.06 billion during the last four-year deal). And the NFL. surprised everyone else by accepting the offer and moving their lucrative product to “the one that has the cartoon show.”

Fox’s arrival didn’t just make them a player on the NFL scene, it also literally changed the landscape of the league itself. Because franchises were now flush with so much extra cash the salary cap immediately increased, allowing teams to pay for coveted free agents or keep their best players.

The change also meant that CBS’s top NFL talent was out of jobs, which meant many of them would jump to Fox, including John Madden and Pat Summerall, who came to be the faces and voices of the NFL on Fox for the decade ahead.

And of course, this move literally created Fox Sports, though John Madden joked that it should be called Fox Sport, “because the only sport we had at Fox was football, NFL football.” Suffice it to say, they earned that -s soon enough.

On the 25th anniversary, The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis wrote an oral history of “the most important deal in sports TV history” that’s worth checking out to remind yourself just how shocking all of this was at the time.

30 years ago today, FOX secured the broadcast right to the NFL’s NFC package. FOX Sports was born and the rest is history. Happy Anniversary and perfect that it lands on a Sunday!

Bryan Curtis of the Ringer wrote a great oral history recapping it:https://t.co/g4iFJuewgx pic.twitter.com/9gdR03xmwf

— Jacob Ullman (@jacobu) December 17, 2023

[WaPo, The Ringer]