American Football League on NBC

American Football League (AFL) on NBC is a

On January 29, 1964, NBC signed a five-year deal with the American Football League (replacing ABC in that role), paying them US$36 million to televise its games.

The 1965 AFL season began many occasions through the years of NBC's October Sunday telecasts that being forced to shift to local stations and productions due to NBC's commitment to postseason baseball. For example, Week 5's game between Kansas City and Denver was aired on Kansas City's WDAF 4. Charlie Jones and Ken Case were on the call for the Chiefs-Broncos game. And with NBC focusing color cameras for the World Series in Los Angeles, it is likely that Week 5's San Diego-Buffalo game (called by Curt Gowdy and Paul Christman) was televised in black and white.

For the

On December 13, 1966, the rights to the Super Bowl for four years were sold to CBS and NBC for $9.5 million. The first ever

The next three AFL-NFL World Championship Games, later renamed the Super Bowl, were then divided by the two networks (with each network broadcasting the game exclusively): CBS broadcast Super Bowls II and IV while NBC covered III. When NBC Sports broadcast Super Bowl III, sports broadcasts were produced under the oversight of the NBC News division (this remained the case until 1978, long after both CBS and ABC had spun off their sports operations into departments separate from their news divisions). Curt Gowdy handled the play-by-play duties and was joined by color commentators Al DeRogatis and Kyle Rote in the broadcast booth. Also helping with NBC's coverage were Jim Simpson (reporting from the sidelines) and Pat Summerall (helping conduct player interviews for the pregame show, along with Rote). In an interview later conducted with NFL Films, Gowdy called it the most memorable game he ever called because of its historical significance.^[7] While the Orange Bowl was sold out for the game, the live telecast was not shown in Miami due to both leagues' unconditional blackout rules at the time. This game is thought to be the earliest surviving Super Bowl game preserved on videotape in its entirety save for a portion of the Baltimore Colts' fourth-quarter scoring drive.

Week 4 of the

One of the most remembered games on NBC was a

To avoid a repeat incident, a 1975 NBC broadcast of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was delayed until the completion of a Washington Redskins–Raiders game. The network installed a new phone in the control room wired to a separate exchange, becoming known as the Heidi Phone, to prevent this situation from occurring in the future.

With the contract with NBC and the increased, heated battle over college prospects, both the AFL and NBC negotiated a

NBC would continuously carry the AFL/AFC's Sunday afternoon games from 1965 through the 1997 season, after which NBC lost the AFC contract to CBS.

Curt Gowdy, who had covered the first five seasons of the American Football League with broadcast partner Paul Christman on ABC, moved over to NBC in the fall of 1965. For the next decade, Gowdy was the lead play-by-play announcer for the network for both AFL football (AFC from 1970 onward) and Major League Baseball games; however, Gowdy also covered a wide range of sports, earning him the nickname of the "broadcaster of everything." Besides Paul Christman, Curt Gowdy's other football broadcast partners were Kyle Rote, Al DeRogatis, Don Meredith, John Brodie and Merlin Olsen.

The trio of Curt Gowdy, Kyle Rote and Al DeRogatis would each also handle two games in Week 1 of the

As previously mentioned, in 1970, after the NFL and AFL completed their merger, NBC signed a contract with the league to broadcast games from the American Football Conference (AFC). After this season, Al DeRogatis and Kyle Rote swapped positions; resulting in DeRogatis being the #1 color commentator alongside Curt Gowdy and Rote being the #2 analyst alongside Jim Simpson.

• Lou Boda^[8]
• Herb Carneal^[9][10]
• Len Dillon
• Bill Enis^[11]
• Curt Gowdy^[12]
• Charlie Jones^[13][14]
• Bill Mazer
• Bill O'Donnell
• Jay Randolph
• Jim Simpson^{[15][16][17][18]}

• Elmer Angsman^[19]
• Chris Burford
• Paul Christman^{[20][21][22][23]}
• Al DeRogatis^{[24][25][26][27]}
• Lee Grosscup^[28]
• Dave Kocourek^[29][30]
• George Ratterman^[31]
• Andy Robustelli
• Kyle Rote^[32][33][34]

• American Football League on NBC at
  IMDb