NBC's 'Sunday Night Football' celebrates 20 years of prime-time dominance

Dick Ebersol helped change comedy and late-night television when he teamed up with Lorne Michaels to create “Saturday Night Live” in 1975.

When it comes to sports television, Ebersol’s creation of “Sunday Night Football” on NBC in 2006 also has had a significant impact.

It is fitting then that both are celebrating milestones this year. “Saturday Night Live” celebrated its 50th season in February, while “Sunday Night Football” is in its 20th season.

“We were really aware that we weren’t just doing a football game, we were doing an important football game, that we would have all the bells and whistles,” Ebersol said about “Sunday Night Football” before accepting the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2019.

This week’s game is a full-circle moment as the New York Giants host the Kansas City Chiefs. SNF began at the Meadowlands in 2006 with the “Manning Bowl,” when Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts faced younger brother Eli and the Giants.

“Sunday Night Football” has been the highest-rated prime-time show for 14 consecutive seasons. The next closest was “American Idol”, which had a six-year streak from 2005-06 through the 2010-11 television season.

NBC’s first three games this season — including the Sept. 4 NFL Kickoff game — are averaging 24.9 million viewers for its best start since 2015.

The Sunday night package put NBC back in the NFL. NBC was without pro football for eight seasons, from 1998 to 2005, after CBS took over the AFC package.

The late Pat Bowlen, who owned the Denver Broncos and chaired the NFL’s broadcast committee, called Ebersol in 2004 to gauge his interest.

“I think it’s exceeded everyone’s even very high expectations going in, and they’ve gone through the roof,” said Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution. “They’ve really never stopped innovating and focused on how to make Sunday night feel like a huge event and a great way to end the day.”

Mike Tirico called “Monday Night Football” on ESPN from 2006 through ’15 before joining NBC in 2016. He was the host of “Football Night in America” until taking over as the play-by-play announcer from Al Michaels in 2022.

Cris Collinsworth, who got his start at NBC after retiring as a player, returned to the network in 2006. He was on the studio show for three years before moving into the booth in 2009 after John Madden’s retirement.

Even though MNF had a 35-plus-year head start as the NFL’s seminal prime-time package, Tirico said it didn't take long for SNF to supplant it because of the matchups and feel of the broadcast.

“I think ‘Sunday Night Football’ has become everything ‘Monday Night Football’ was and more now in a much more saturated TV environment,” Tirico said. “So I think without Monday night, you don’t have what Sunday night has, but it took a special group of people, great planning and purpose to get Sunday night to where it is now. This run of being the No. 1 show in prime-time television for almost a decade and a half now, that’s extraordinary.”

Fred Gaudelli, who produced “Sunday Night Football” from 2006 through 2022 after working on “Monday Night Football” for five years, said the success of Sunday night’s package at the start was due to Ebersol’s constant attention to the game schedule.

“There’s never been a network president, I’m very confident in saying this, that made the schedule a bigger priority than Dick Ebersol did,” said Gaudelli, the executive producer for the past three seasons. “If you check our schedules like the first five or six years, I think we had (Tom) Brady versus (Peyton) Manning four of the five times, and we had all the big Cowboys games. So all of a sudden, every Sunday night is a big game. Monday night was ingrained in the American culture, but literally within two or three years, we had reversed it.”

Something that Gaudelli sold Ebersol on, though, was having a musical open to the show, especially when Gaudelli mentioned how much NBC could earn from having a sponsor.

Gaudelli went to his iPod, heard Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” and started to come up with lyrics that have been a staple of the show. Pink performed “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” before it switched to Faith Hill and now Carrie Underwood.

“I’ve had a front-row seat as the team created a sports presentation that went far beyond sports, with the integration of storytelling, pop culture and a musical show open that has become iconic,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said.

Sunday night also introduced flex scheduling, allowing a less-appealing matchup late in the season to be swapped for a better game with at least 12 days’ notice. The only exception is the final week of the regular season, when the matchup is set one week out to ensure the final game has playoff implications.

Flex scheduling has expanded to Monday and Thursday nights.

Even though Ebersol left as president of NBC Sports in 2011, many of his innovations and attention to storytelling still resonate.

“I had been at NBC for almost 10 years prior to starting on ‘Sunday Night Football’. You do a good show, get a pat on the back and move on to the next show,” said Rob Hyland, the coordinating producer of SNF. “This was so different in that we basically did forensics on our presentation each week, during the season, during the offseason, and it really helped me learn that the standard for this show, even from Day 1, was going to be different than anything I’d ever worked on.

“Nothing has changed in terms of that standard. It’s only gotten higher.”

NBC has aired Sunday night games from 40 stadiums, with Dallas playing in the most games in the series at 61. The most-viewed game was the 2012 season finale between the Cowboys and Washington, which averaged 30.3 million.

Andy Reid will coach in his 50th Sunday night game this week.

Even though the original Giants Stadium, where the Manning Bowl took place, is now a parking lot, its successor has had a couple of Sunday night moments since opening in 2010. That included Odell Beckham Jr.'s one-handed grab when the Giants took on the Cowboys in 2014. Drew Esocoff, who has been the director for the entire 20 seasons, called it the top play in the SNF series not including the five Super Bowls NBC has done since the 2008 season.

“You go back to Dick Ebersol one more time, for him to create that kind of late relationship with the league and understand that more eyeballs were naturally on Sunday night anyway, that if they just put better games and better teams there, that they could end up with the No. 1 television show, which no sports program had ever been the No. 1 show,” Collinsworth said. “It was a great collaboration. It was the NFL stepping back and going, ‘Oh, never thought about that.’ And Dick making the point.”

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FILE - Dick Ebersol arrives for the Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremony Saturday, Sept. 10, 2022, in Springfield, Mass. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)

FILE - NBC Sports play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico, left, sits next to color commentator Cris Collinsworth before an NFL football game between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Miami Dolphins on Dec. 11, 2022, in Inglewood, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

NUUK, Greenland (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump has turned the Arctic island of Greenland into a geopolitical hotspot with his demands to own it and suggestions that the U.S. could take it by force.

The island is a semiautonomous region of Denmark, and Denmark's foreign minister said Wednesday after a meeting at the White House that a “ fundamental disagreement ” remains with Trump over the island.

The crisis is dominating the lives of Greenlanders and "people are not sleeping, children are afraid, and it just fills everything these days. And we can’t really understand it,” Naaja Nathanielsen, a Greenlandic minister said at a meeting with lawmakers in Britain’s Parliament this week.

Here's a look at what Greenlanders have been saying:

Trump has dismissed Denmark’s defenses in Greenland, suggesting it’s “two dog sleds.”

By saying that, Trump is “undermining us as a people,” Mari Laursen told AP.

Laursen said she used to work on a fishing trawler but is now studying law. She approached AP to say she thought previous examples of cooperation between Greenlanders and Americans are “often overlooked when Trump talks about dog sleds.”

She said during World War II, Greenlandic hunters on their dog sleds worked in conjunction with the U.S. military to detect Nazi German forces on the island.

“The Arctic climate and environment is so different from maybe what they (Americans) are used to with the warships and helicopters and tanks. A dog sled is more efficient. It can go where no warship and helicopter can go,” Laursen said.

Trump has repeatedly claimed Russian and Chinese ships are swarming the seas around Greenland. Plenty of Greenlanders who spoke to AP dismissed that claim.

“I think he (Trump) should mind his own business,” said Lars Vintner, a heating engineer.

“What's he going to do with Greenland? He speaks of Russians and Chinese and everything in Greenlandic waters or in our country. We are only 57,000 people. The only Chinese I see is when I go to the fast food market. And every summer we go sailing and we go hunting and I never saw Russian or Chinese ships here in Greenland,” he said.

Down at Nuuk's small harbor, Gerth Josefsen spoke to AP as he attached small fish as bait to his lines. He said, “I don't see them (the ships)” and said he had only seen “a Russian fishing boat ten years ago.”

Maya Martinsen, 21, a shop worker, told AP she doesn't believe Trump wants Greenland to enhance America's security.

“I know it’s not national security. I think it’s for the oils and minerals that we have that are untouched,” she said, suggesting the Americans are treating her home like a “business trade.”

She said she thought it was good that American, Greenlandic and Danish officials met in the White House Wednesday and said she believes that “the Danish and Greenlandic people are mostly on the same side,” despite some Greenlanders wanting independence.

“It is nerve-wrecking, that the Americans aren’t changing their mind,” she said, adding that she welcomed the news that Denmark and its allies would be sending troops to Greenland because “it’s important that the people we work closest with, that they send support.”

Tuuta Mikaelsen, a 22-year-old student, told AP that she hopes the U.S. got the message from Danish and Greenlandic officials to “back off.”

She said she didn't want to join the United States because in Greenland “there are laws and stuff, and health insurance .. .we can go to the doctors and nurses ... we don’t have to pay anything,” she said adding "I don’t want the U.S. to take that away from us.”

In Greenland's parliament, Juno Berthelsen, MP for the Naleraq opposition party that campaigns for independence in the Greenlandic parliament told AP that he has done multiple media interviews every day for the last two weeks.

When asked by AP what he would say to Trump and Vice President JD Vance if he had the chance, Berthelsen said:

“I would tell them, of course, that — as we’ve seen — a lot of Republicans as well as Democrats are not in favor of having such an aggressive rhetoric and talk about military intervention, invasion. So we would tell them to move beyond that and continue this diplomatic dialogue and making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”

“It is our country,” he said. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people.”

Kwiyeon Ha and Evgeniy Maloletka contributed to this report.

FILE - A woman pushes a stroller with her children in Nuuk, Greenland, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

Military vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen of the Royal Danish Navy patrols near Nuuk, Greenland, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Juno Berthelsen, MP for the Naleraq opposition party that campaigns for independence in the Greenlandic parliament poses for photo at his office in Nuuk, Greenland, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Fisherman Gerth Josefsen prepares fishing lines at the harbour of Nuuk, Greenland, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A woman walks on a street past a Greenlandic national flag in Nuuk, Greenland, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)