If you choose to do so, you will be part of an audience made up of residents of Phoenix and the Bay Area, as well as serious football junkies and degenerate gamblers.
Otherwise, you're probably watching nobodies with good pitch trying to become famous on NBC's The Voice, or people you're faintly familiar with demonstrating their chutzpah on Dancing With The Stars on ABC, or being told when to chuckle by the laugh track on CBS's two-hour block of identical situation comedies.
It wasn't always so. Back in the 1970s, Monday Night Football was a ratings behemoth, introducing Americans to the concept of watching sports in prime time on a weeknight, as well as providing a national villain in Howard Cosell.
Thirty-nine years ago today, Cosell -- reviled by Bills fans throughout the 1970s for supposedly snubbing the team on his weekly round-up of the previous day's highlights, even though he had no role in choosing which games to feature -- was in Orchard Park for Buffalo's first appearance on Monday Night Football. The series, which also made stars of play-by-play man Frank Gifford and possibly inebriated former Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith, was midway through its fourth season on ABC. It was also the first MNF visit to Rich Stadium, which had officially opened less than two months earlier.
O.J. Simpson was the big story, for purely football-related reasons. After three lousy seasons on terrible Bills teams that won eight of 42 games between 1969 and '71, never rushing for more than 697 yards, Simpson broke out in '72, leading the league with 1,251 yards during the first season of Lou Saban's second stint as Buffalo's coach.
That performance was a warm-up for '73, when the former first overall draft pick opened the season with a then-record 250 yards against New England and barely slowed down from there.
By the time Kansas City came to town for the first prime-time appearance by Simpson and the Bills, he was already on pace to challenge Jim Brown's decade-old record of 1,863 yards on the ground.
The Bills were more than willing to keep Simpson in the spotlight, giving him the ball an NFL-record 39 times. He didn't run wild, but still picked up 157 yards and scored two first-quarter touchdowns, which proved an ample cushion as Buffalo won 23-14 to improve to 5-2. Buffalo's defense turned in what may have been its best outing of what became a 9-5 season, holding the Chiefs to 105 total yards in front of a raucous sell-out crowd.
Simpson finished the night with 1,025 yards for the half-season, turning his quest for Brown's record and, ultimately, the 2,000-yard milestone, into a national story.
THE SUDDEN EMERGENCE OF OJ WAS OF COURSE DUE TO THE FACT THAT THE BILLS WENT OUT AND RECRUITED A GREAT OFFENSIVE LINE.That said he was one of the best when he blew by the backers and faced nil but cbs and safeties--I used to stand up and scream BYE BYE Baby when he shifted into that third gear.
ReplyDeleteAND I loved the original MNF.Cosell and Meredith and even straight man Gifford were a great team...sigh--the good old days.
The line certainly was a big part of it. But John Rauch seemed to resent Simpson's presence (his Oakland teams were geared around deep throws and power running, not a tailback-oriented running attack). For Simpson's first two years, he was used largely as a decoy and even split out as a flanker, rarely lined up in an I or with a blocking fullback. Rauch was fired before '71, and O.J.'s season was shortened by a knee injury. Given how bad the Bills were that year, it was probably for the best. Braxton's emergence in '72 as a lead blocker and additional running/receiving threat helped, too.
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