NFL on Fox

The NFL on Fox (also known as Fox NFL) is the branding used for broadcasts of National Football League (NFL) games produced by Fox Sports and televised on the Fox broadcast network. Game coverage is usually preceded by Fox NFL Kickoff and Fox NFL Sunday and is followed on weeks when the network airs a Doubleheader by The OT. The latter two shows feature the same studio hosts and analysts for both programs, who also contribute to the former. In weeks when Fox airs a doubleheader, the late broadcast (which airs nationwide in nearly all markets, there typically being only one to three games taking place at the time) airs under the brand America's Game of the Week, almost always featuring the Dallas Cowboys due to their national appeal.

Fox aired its inaugural NFL game telecast on August 12, 1994, with a preseason game between the Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Coverage formally began the following month on September 4, with the premiere of Fox NFL Sunday, followed by a slate of six regionally televised regular season games on the first Sunday of the 1994 season.

Though Fox was growing rapidly as a network, and had established itself as a presence, it was still not considered a major competitor to the more established "Big Three" broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). Fox management, having seen the critical role that soccer programming had played in the growth of British satellite service BSkyB, believed that sports, and specifically professional football, would be the engine that would turn Fox into a major network the quickest.

To this end, Fox had bid aggressively for football broadcast rights almost from the start. It notably passed on the original United States Football League (USFL), which had hoped to move to the fall in 1986, the same time Fox was to debut, and was seeking a broadcast contract; the USFL would shut down instead. In 1987, Fox's first full year on the air, ABC initially hedged on renewing its contract to carry Monday Night Football – then the league's crown-jewel program – and was in the middle of negotiations to reach a new contract, due to an increased expense of the rights. Fox made an offer to the NFL to acquire the Monday Night Football contract for the same amount ABC that had been paying to carry the package, about US$1.3 billion at the time. However, the NFL, in part because Fox had not yet established itself as a major network, chose to renew its contract with ABC.

Meanwhile, after the Fox Broadcasting Company was launched, David Dixon, founder of the above-mentioned USFL, proposed the creation of the "American Football Federation", a spring league that would be made up of ten teams and draft high school graduates who were declared academically ineligible to play College Football by the NCAA. The proposed league never came to fruition.

Despite having a few successful shows in its slate and scoring a major coup when longtime NBC affiliate WSVN in Miami switched to Fox in 1989 after NBC bought longtime CBS affiliate WTVJ, Fox did not have a significant market share until the early 1990s when Fox parent News Corporation (which became 21st Century Fox through the July 2013 spin-off of its publishing unit, now the current News Corp.) began to upgrade some of its local affiliates – and eventually purchased additional stations from other television station groups, such as New World Communications and Chris-Craft Industries' BHC Communications and United Television, making it the largest owner of television stations in the United States. The time now filled by NFL on Fox on Sunday afternoons during the fall and winter months was formerly in the control of the stations themselves (and still is to some extent outside of the NFL season, particularly during weeks when no sports programming is scheduled at all by Fox, as well as on non-doubleheader weeks during the season or in home markets when a competing channel is airing a home game cancelling a doubleheader on Fox stations in those areas), which usually filled the timeslots with either syndicated television series (both first-run and off-network) and/or movie blocks. The Sunday afternoon timeslot in the spring is filled by NASCAR on Fox's coverage of the NASCAR Cup Series.

Six years after its first attempt, the league's television contracts for both conferences and for the Sunday and Monday prime time football packages came up for renewal again in 1993.

Many expected that the NFL would receive less money than the $3.6 billion for four years that ABC, CBS, NBC, TNT, and ESPN had paid in 1990. Fox wanted the NFL to build credibility for itself; even those working in television thought of it as "the one that has that cartoon show" (The Simpsons). More than 85% of affiliates were UHF stations. Knowing that it would likely need to bid considerably more than the incumbent networks, Fox bid $1.58 billion to obtain a four-year contract for the broadcast rights to the National Football Conference (NFC), exceeding CBS's bid by more than $100 million per year. The NFC was considered the more desirable conference than the American Football Conference (AFC), whose television package was being carried at the time by NBC, due to the NFC's presence in most of the largest U.S. markets, such as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas, the last of which was gaining a national following in the 1990s. Fox also caught CBS at an inopportune time, as the network was in a distant third in the ratings at the time and was going under cost-cutting measures under Laurence Tisch (whose family co-owns the New York Giants) that would eventually lead to its sale to Westinghouse Broadcasting in 1995.