NBC Sunday Night Football is a weekly television broadcast of Sunday evening National Football League games on NBC that began airing on Sunday, August 6, 2006 with the pre-season opening Hall of Fame Game. Al Michaels serves as the play-by-play announcer, with Cris Collinsworth as the color commentator and Michele Tafoya as the sideline reporter. Fred Gaudelli and Drew Esocoff, the lead producer and director respectively, carry over their duties from ABC's telecasts of Monday Night Football. John Madden, the color commentator for the first three years of the program, retired prior to the 2009 season; Collinsworth succeeded him. ESPN, which aired Sunday night games from the 1987 through 2005 NFL seasons, took over Monday Night Football from sister network ABC starting in 2006.
In the 2011–12 season, it was named the highest rated, most watched TV program in Nielsen ratings. In second place was American Idol, a show that had previously held the title of most watched TV program for eight consecutive seasons and eight straight years.
Starting in 2012, under the new NFL television contract, a Spanish-language simulcast will eventually air on sister network Telemundo; currently like all networks with NFL television contracts, NBC's SAP channel features Spanish-language audio, though promoted by NBC as "provided by Telemundo".
