NFL Research results in the start of Monday Night Football

One of the biggest football games played so far was this past Monday between the Superbowl Champs the New Orleans Saints and the San Francisco 49ers. This game alone average 15.1 million viewers.

This many people watching a game on television on a Monday night?

Apparently the start of Monday Night Football began as a research project.

The sport grew around the media outlets. The big name channels such as NBC, CBS and ABC, determined how many games could be watched, so from the start the success of the national football was dependent on television viewers.

During the 1960s, then NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle wanted to know how to get more people to watch football. He wanted to have more days of football to increase there very low ratings they had.Through research he eliminated almost every weekday, except Monday.

Rozelle decided to experiment with the concept of playing on Monday night, scheduling the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions for a game on September 28, 1964. While the game was not televised, it drew a sellout crowd of 59,203 to Tiger Stadium, the largest crowd ever to watch a professional football game in Detroit up to that point. He believed that if this many people would show up to the game, imagine how many people would watch it on television. Networks were hesitant at first to compete with soap operas and other entertainment shows.

This correlation would be proven true, when he finally convinced television networks to air the first Monday Night Football game in 1970. Due to his research and experiment results, Monday Night Football is now one of the most watch sporting programs.

Quote from an article about the History of Monday Night Football:

"The idea of football in primetime certainly worked. Demographics show that nearly 40 percent of Monday Night Football viewers are women, breaking the long-held belief that sports could not compete successfully in primetime against entertainment. The series' success was immediate. The schedule of 13 Monday night games shocked the critics, who predicted the series would achieve no better than a 24 percent share of the audience, by drawing 31 percent of America's viewers. The current schedule has grown to 20 Mondays (17 regular season, 3 preseason), all in primetime."