There are certain sounds that can immediately take you back, and this old CBS NFL opening from 1977 does it for me.
Before RedZone, fantasy-football apps and having practically every game available somewhere, Sunday afternoon football meant turning on one of the three networks. If you were watching the NFC, chances are you were watching CBS.
And The NFL Today had become part of the ritual.
There was Brent Musburger, Irv Cross and Phyllis George, with Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder contributing his predictions. What I never really appreciated at the time was how groundbreaking that desk was. Cross became the first Black man working full-time as a national television sports analyst, while George — the former Miss America — helped open a door for women in network sports broadcasting that had barely existed before.
And then there’s that music. The theme was called “Horizontal Hold,” written by Jan Stoeckart under the name Jack Trombey. Hear a few seconds of it and suddenly it feels like Sunday afternoon again.
The football itself was different too. 1977 was the last 14-game NFL season. The league had already voted that spring to expand to 16 games beginning in 1978, along with an expanded playoff format.
CBS had the NFC, NBC had the AFC, and ABC had Monday Night Football. Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier were CBS’s top game announcers, and there were no streaming packages or instant access to every matchup.
The NFL Today became so successful that its studio format helped establish the blueprint for the pregame shows we still watch today. CBS eventually lost NFL football when Fox took the NFC package beginning in 1994, but The NFL Today returned in 1998 when CBS came back with the AFC.
Does hearing this opening bring back Sunday afternoons in your house — and who do you remember most: Brent, Phyllis, Irv or Jimmy the Greek?