Fox aired its inaugural NFL game telecast on August 12, 1994, with a preseason game between the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The network passed on the United States Football League, which had hoped to move to fall in 1986, the same time Fox was to debut, and was seeking a broadcast contract. Fox bid USD 1. 58 billion to obtain a four-year contract for the broadcast rights to the National Football Conference.
About NFL on Fox in brief
Fox aired its inaugural NFL game telecast on August 12, 1994, with a preseason game between the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Coverage formally began the following month on September 4, with the premiere of Fox NFL Sunday, followed by a slate of six regionally televised regular season games on the first Sunday of the 1994 season. The network passed on the United States Football League, which had hoped to move to fall in 1986, the same time Fox was to debut, and was seeking a broadcast contract. Despite having a few successful shows in its slate, the network did not have a significant market share until the early 1990s when Fox parent News Corporation began to upgrade some of its local affiliates. Fox bid USD 1. 58 billion to obtain a four-year contract for the broadcast rights to the National Football Conference, exceeding CBS’s bid by more than USD 100 million per year. Fox’s coverage, in addition to being able to televise NFC regular season and playoff games, also included the exclusive U.S. Super Bowl rights to Super Bowl XXXI under the initial contract. The time now filled by Fox NFL on Sunday afternoons during the fall and winter months was formerly in the control of the stations themselves, which usually filled the timeslots with either syndicated television series andor movie blocks. The Sunday afternoon timeslot in the spring is filled by NASCAR on Fox’s coverage of the NASCAR Cup Series. The NFL on Fox is the branding used for broadcasts of National Football League games produced by Fox Sports and televised on the Fox broadcast network.
In weeks when Fox airs a doubleheader, the late broadcast airs under the brand America’s Game of the Week. Fox management, having seen the critical role that soccer programming had played in the growth of British satellite service BSkyB, believed that sports, and specifically professional football, would be the engine that would turn Fox into a major network the quickest. Fox was mostly known for blue-collar sitcoms like The Simpsons and Married. Children. Fox still lacked a successful shows, like The X-Files, and with so much skepticism about the NFL, it had to assure viewers that Bart Simpson would not be an announcer for the NFL and that he would be a good sport. Fox wanted the NFL to build credibility for its network. Knowing that it would likely need to bid considerably more than the incumbent networks, Fox bid $1.6 billion for the rights to NFC games in 1993. The NFC was considered the more desirable conference, whose television package was being carried at the time by NBC) due to its presence in most of the largest U. S. markets, such as New York City, Chicago, and Dallas, which the Cowboys were gaining a national following in the 90’s markets. Fox would strip CBS of football rights in the process of stripping CBS of the rights for the first time since 1956 for the Super Bowl in 1998.
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This page is based on the article NFL on Fox published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 09, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
