NBC Sunday Night Football - Similarity To ABC

Similarity To ABC

Much of NBC's Sunday Night Football production crew comes from ABC/ESPN, including Fred Gaudelli and Drew Esocoff (producer and director, respectively), as ESPN moved most of its previous Sunday night crew over to Monday Night Football. Michaels, Madden and Kremer also came to NBC directly from ABC/ESPN, and Football Night in America's Sterling Sharpe was a member of ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown in recent years (calling several Sunday night games for the network in 2005). With regard to using ABC/ESPN talent, NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol said, "I was not interested in the quote, unquote vanity of starting anew ... There's not a lot of room for experimentation."

Also, NBC has the starters introduce themselves, much as ABC did in the last few years of its run, and the short postgame show (so affiliates can get to their late newscasts) follows a similar format to ABC's.

Michaels and Madden ended each telecast in the 2007 and 2008 NFL seasons by selecting an MVP for that night's game to receive the Horse Trailer award (with a photo of each recipient being affixed to the side of a production truck, also known as a "horse trailer"). This concept originated from Madden's days with the NFL on CBS, where he invented the similar "Turkey Leg Award" for the Thanksgiving Classic in 1989 (he later took the concept to Fox, then expanded it to every game of the year with the Horse Trailer Award when he joined ABC in 2002). In the 2006 season, the MVP concept was modified slightly, where the game's MVP was called the "Rock Star of the Game" and had his photo placed on a display at the "Top of the Rock" observation deck atop the GE Building, NBC's New York headquarters, in New York. When Madden retired following Super Bowl XLIII, the Horse Trailer Player of the Game award was discontinued.