Monday Night Football was the premier sports series in the country entering the 21st century, and there wasn’t a close second. College football wasn’t in primetime every weekend. The NHL was barely on television. Baseball was still struggling after the 1994 strike. The NBA lost Jordan and endured a lockout season that tanked ratings.
Despite being such a highly-rated show, Monday Night Football was going through an existential crisis in 2000 because it wasn’t the power it was in the 70’s or 80’s. So ABC swung for the fences and hired Dennis Miller as a color analyst.
Today, Dennis Miller is another washed-up celebrity throwing away his career by supporting Donald Trump. In 2000, he was one of the country’s most well-known comics. He had no background in sports. It was the most head-scratching hire in sports history.
Yet that entire summer, it was all anyone could talk about. I was beginning my sophomore year at George Washington University in the fall of 2000, and it’s all we could talk about too. We always got together weekly to drink, smoke, and watch Monday Night Football. That first game, though, felt like Christmas arriving. What would happen?
What happened is the single greatest season of Monday Night Football ever, and it had very little to do with Dennis Miller.
Sept 4: Rams 41, Broncos 36
Before the NFL had a Thursday night kickoff game, the first game for the defending champ was the biggest game of opening weekend. The “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams were an anomaly that offseason because they had come from out of nowhere in 1999 to win the Super Bowl. So that summer was one long debate about whether they were a fluke or not.
Dennis Miller’s debut in the booth with Dan Fouts and Al Michaels was pretty much what you expected. He knew enough about football to be passable and his long punchlines confused Dan while frustrating Al. It felt like pretty damn good television.
Sept/Oct: 4 of 5 games decided by 1 score
As the season began, it felt like every game was close and you were watching to the end. This meant more exposure to Dennis Miller in the booth. If you had asked me in late September to predict the future of Monday Night Football, I would’ve said he’d be in the booth for the next decade. This wild experiment was working. Or so I thought.
It turns out quality football leads to a watchable telecast regardless of who is calling the game. Unless that person is Joe Buck, of course.
October 7: The SNL Skit
Saturday Night Live goes through periods where it’s irrelevant, like it has been for the past few years as its political commentary has been surpassed by dozens of competitors. That wasn’t the case in 2000. The show was still razor sharp in its commentary, while having an absolute murderer’s row of cast members. There are few eras of SNL, if any, that had the star power of the 2000-01 cast.
Nowhere was this more evident than in its epic skit on the Monday Night Football crew. It featured future mega stars Jimmy Fallon, Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph, and Tracy Morgan, with Darrell Hammond, the country’s best impersonator, as Al Michaels.
The skit has everything. Jimmy Fallon’s pitch perfect Dennis Miller. Will Ferrell masterfully skewering all football commentators with his Dan Fouts. Tracy Morgan ending Eric Dickerson’s career. And Maya Rudolph’s Melissa Stark highlighting issues with women in sports that still linger to this day.
An absolute tour de force that you need to watch right now:
October 23: Jets 40, Dolphins 37 (OT)
As a Jets fan, I will admit that I left the room in the third quarter. My friends kept watching, but I needed my space. Then around 11:30 p.m., my roommate screamed from the other room, “Sean, you have to get in here!”
In an era before smartphones, I couldn’t check if they were messing with me before walking back into the room to check the score. They weren’t messing with me. The Jets were making this comeback. The fourth quarter of that game is one of the most incredible that I’ve ever watched in my life, with the Jets making a ridiculous comeback, then giving up a soul-crushing touchdown, and still tying it up with a touchdown pass to Jumbo Elliot. Jumbo Elliot! What a time to be alive!
When they won in overtime, I partied until much too late and highly doubt any of us made it to class that Tuesday morning. A great Monday Night Football game that went to overtime? You just never saw that...
November 6: Packers 26, Vikings 20 (OT)
And then it happened two week later! Yes, this is the “He Did What?” game when Antonio Freeman caught a game-winning touchdown off of his butt. Brett Favre. Randy Moss. A rainy Lambeau Field. The football gods could not have given us a better game.
But there was one fly in the ointment. Dennis Miller was out of his depth during both overtime games. He was, like us, just a fan. His contributions during big moments were basically, “Whoa!” and “Wow!” The comedian was a perfect analyst for early season games. It wasn’t the same when the games mattered.
December 18: Bucs 38, Rams 35
These two teams played the year prior in the NFC Championship Game and both were preseason favorites to win the Super Bowl. At this point though, both teams had underperformed and were playing for their playoff lives. It looked for the world that only one of these teams would make the playoffs, so the stakes could not have been any higher.
By a stroke of fortune, the Rams did end up making the playoffs despite the loss. As for the television coverage, it was now apparent that Dennis Miller wasn’t a fit and the booth was a disaster for big games. We didn’t need jokes. The game deserved gravitas. It didn’t always get it.
The Epilogue
The last game the trio called that year was the Saints/Rams playoff game, which ended with a thud when the Rams muffed a punt before it could get the ball to start a last minute drive to win the game. It was a disappointing end to Dennis Miller’s season, but it was appropriate. Despite so many expectations for the booth, it simply did not work.
ABC brought the trio back for another go in 2001. After 9/11, Dennis Miller in the booth somehow felt even stupider. Living in DC, I don’t remember much about fall 2001 in general, other than the Strokes debut and the wild end to the college football season.
By 2002, ABC smartly acquired John Madden to pair with Al Michaels. While it lacked the headlines of Dennis Miller, it was a great booth. It just wasn’t Pat Summerall and John Madden.
ESPN got Monday Night Football in 2005, and the brand has suffered ever since as they consistently tried stunt casting and special guests to liven up broadcasts. The only quality pair they had, Mike Tirico and Jon Gruden, was still divisie and now gone.
Today, ESPN is still struggling to find the magic they found in 2000. As a college football fan, it pains me to say that their best choice is probably Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit, but let’s hope they love college football too much to leave it.
That 2000 Monday Night Football season was magical and it wasn’t because of Dennis Miller. The magic of Monday Night Football has never been about the announcers, no matter how much old timers tell you about Howard Cosell. It’s been about the games, the players, and the moments.
Monday Night Football is iconic because of legendary games, and that was never more evident than in the 2000 season.
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