Theme Songs for Primetime Weeknight NFL Games Are More Than Just Music

ESPN, NBC, Amazon Prime have their own takes — musically and culturally

The phenomenon that is the Taylor Swift Effect demonstrates how the singer’s concert tours have lifted retail, hospitality, and even tax revenues in cities that host them. And the singer’s love life — the topic of much of her oeuvre — has even given a boost to the NFL: her appearance at a trio of Kansas City Chiefs games, the team for whom her current swain, tight end Travis Kelce, plays, has actually moved ratings. Her attendance at the Oct. 1 Kansas City Chiefs–New York Jets game helped NBC’s Sunday Night Football score an average of 27 million viewers across all platforms, making it the most-watched NFL Sunday since Super Bowl LVII in February.

Music and the NFL have been a duo for far longer, though. The theme songs for two of three primetime NFL broadcasts have themselves become cultural icons. The most notable — and contentious — was country star Hank Williams Jr.’s adaptation of his 1981 hit “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” as “All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night,” the opening theme for ESPN’s Monday Night Football in 2011.

It didn’t last long. After Williams made snide comments on Fox News about President Barack Obama, the network dropped the song and the singer, going to a cold open for the rest of the season. But “All My Rowdy Friends…” made a comeback in 2018, with Williams duetting with country duo Florida-Georgia Line and R&B singer Jason Derulo.

All My New Friends Are Coming Over

This year, ESPN debuted the new official opening song, a rework of 1981 Phil Collins classic “In the Air Tonight,” featuring Americana country-rocker Chris Stapleton, drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, and ubiquitous rapper Snoop Dogg. Co-produced by ESPN’s Creative Content Unit and Grammy-winner David Cobb, it airs before all MNF games on ABC and ESPN.

ESPN’s Joanne Strange says that, choosing an artist for the new Monday Night Football theme, “we wanted someone who would have a big reach to our audience, who was cross-generational.”

The artistic ingredients seem to check a lot of inclusionary boxes, including gender and ethnicity, but ESPN Music Operations Supervisor Joanne Strange says the choices were collateral rather than calculated.

“We wanted someone who would have a big reach to our audience, who was cross-generational, somebody that everybody knew of,” says Strange, noting that Stapleton had caught the ear of the production team with his soulful rendition of the National Anthem before this year’s Super Bowl on Fox. “We needed somebody that can belt out a song like ‘In the Air Tonight,’ and Chris Stapleton was at the top of our list.”

Producer Dave Cobb, who won a Best Country Song Award in 2022 with Stapleton and had previously worked with ESPN on NFL-show opening themes, came aboard as the track’s producer. Stapleton, in turn, voiced his desire to work with Snoop Dogg, with whom Strange says ESPN has collaborated on other projects and whose rapping offered an opportunity for lyrical customization. All that was needed was someone to play the iconic 1980s-era gated-reverb tom-tom fills made famous on Phil Collins’s original version of the song. Cindy Blackman Santana — whose husband, famed guitarist Carlos Santana, proposed to her right after she had finished a drum solo — had the perfect credentials, completing an artistic triumvirate that crosses genre and generational lines.

“I think the percussion in that song is maybe the most famous piece of percussion in 50 years of pop music,” says Julie McGlone, VP, creative content production, ESPN. “The fact that we’re crossing genres with country and hip-hop and then jazz and rock with Cindy brings the diversity of musical genres and musical fans together. And that’s what the NFL audience is, right? It’s this cross-section of America in what we all listen to together.”

SNF: Changing It Up Every Season

For NBC’s Sunday Night Football, eight-time Grammy Award-winner Carrie Underwood reprised the regularly updated rendition of the show’s “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” theme song for the 11th consecutive season. The new show open features a concert performance, from the Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, home of her ongoing residency, interspersed with augmented-reality highlights displayed across a halo scoreboard.

The song, a rewrite of Joan Jett’s 1988 hit “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” has been part of SNF for all of its 18 seasons on NBC, with renditions by Pink and Faith Hill before Underwood took over the franchise. The most recent iteration was recorded at Nashville’s Starstruck Studios, produced by Underwood’s record producer, Chris DeStefano. Like previous versions, it was recorded the spring before the NFL season kicked off, with each section of the track analyzed for potential new wrinkles.

NBC Sports’ Tripp Dixon: “There’s a visual challenge and a sonic challenge every year. It needs to be recognizable, but I think it also needs to evolve from season to season.”

“Every season, we’re striving to do something different within the theme,” says Tripp Dixon, VP/creative director, NBC Sports Group. “The music is essentially the same, but we challenge ourselves to do something different from an arrangement standpoint. We discuss the pacing, the tempo, the grit of the lead guitar, the vocals, what we are going to do differently structurally.”

Dixon’s description of the process is not unlike laying out a football play: “It’s a 10-second intro, you’ve got two verses, and you’ve got a refrain and a big chorus and a short solo where it starts to really peak. Then you’ve got that home stretch to where you get to that ‘ta-da’ moment with Sunday Night Football logo and you go live. We look at all these different sections, like the intro, and [ask] how do we reimagine that? What are we doing for the solo this year? There’s a lot of room to play and interpret. In the case of this year’s open, having Carrie perform part of the drum solo is brand new.”

Once the track was done, the video of the SNF opening was shot at Underwood’s Resorts World residency venue, where Dixon says the live band adds concert-like energy. In the Nashville recording session, Underwood sequentially records the names of each team that SNF will feature in the coming season. (The video is cut so that singing the team names doesn’t cause lip-sync issues onscreen.)

“There’s a visual challenge and a sonic challenge every year,” says Dixon. “How are we doing it differently? How are we reinventing this piece? We want to respect the integrity of that iconic [guitar and vocal] riff. It needs to be recognizable, but I think it also needs to evolve from season to season.”

Prime Video: From Classic to Classical

As the broadcast networks continue with popular and legacy music and artists for their NFL themes, Amazon Prime Video, in its second season of streaming Thursday Night Football, has gone classical instead of classic. Last year, the streamer partnered with composer Pinar Toprak, who has done scores for such films as Captain Marvel and the Fortnite videogame, to create an all-new original score and theme music for TNF.

Composer Pinar Toprak conducted a 70-piece orchestra to record her new score for the Thursday Night Football open.

The TNF anthem, recorded over two days last year at Ocean Way Studios in Nashville with Toprak conducting a 70-piece orchestra that was mixed and mastered by Grammy-winning audio engineer Alan Meyerson, had a number of firsts: the first completely new theme music for an NFL-package rightsholder since Star Wars composer John Williams penned “Wide Receiver” for NBC Sports in 2006 (which is still part of NBC’s SNF music package), and Toprak also is the first woman to compose an original theme music for an NFL media package.

Given how both NBC and ABC/ESPN have currently and historically gone with pop/rock tracks and artists — Underwood, Stapleton, Hill, Williams Jr., etc. — Prime Video’s decision to take a very traditional orchestral approach, evocative of the triumphal sports themes of the ’60s and ’70s, seems surprising.

“We sought to create a theme that was timeless and classic, with modern sensibilities,” says Betsy Riley, senior coordinating producer, live sports, Prime Video. “We wanted to produce a piece of music that could match the varied narrative moods of a football game: from tension and tumult to uncertainty and triumph or defeat.”

Adds Toprak, an Emmy-nominated composer, conductor, and performer and, with Captain Marvel and Fortnite, the first woman to score both a film and videogame with gross revenues of more than $1 billion and $5 billion, respectively, “Our goal was to create a memorable theme that is both current and timeless. We leaned on the big brass and muscular energy of legacy scores, in combination with unique, lyrical moments, to achieve a feeling of heart and soul. I could not be more excited to share this new anthem with the world and hope it will connect with fans and players alike as we make TNF history.”

The prosaically named “Prime Video Sports Theme” may be traditionally orchestral, but it has undergone some more contemporary versioning, including a dance/party remix. And the show’s original-music complement this season includes steel-guitar wizard Robert Randolph’s “Ain’t Nothing Wrong With That” as the opening theme for TNF Tonight. Like the main theme, it is mixed in 5.1 surround, the broadcast-audio format also used for Thursday Night Football.

“We created a lot of options last year, building our music toolset throughout the season,” says Riley. “We’ve been very pleased with the results. Our viewers [will] hear a lot of variety throughout the season, but it all stems from Pinar Toprak’s great original score created last season.”

Music Is Part of the Picture for Primetime Football

Like almost everything else in media now, every move has to be carefully vetted for potential cultural landmines, and the memory of Hank Williams Jr.’s brief turn at the opening of MNF ensured that ESPN would be extra careful in its choice of a new musical frontend. According to McGlone, the process of choosing the new theme song took the better part of two years and involved focus groups that found that Stapleton touched all the bases.

“He’s a rock-solid family guy, [with a] huge young country and rock audience,” she says. “He crosses genres and is known to be open-minded in musical appetite. I think that’s why he became the foundation of [the project].”

Careful vetting is not surprising, since the cultural importance of theme songs of primetime football shows is now well-established. NBC’s Dixon notes that, when Underwood’s version of the SNF track was played on the big screen at a game, the audience sang along word for word. And the songs play the same role that theme music does for any iconic visuals, from the low-E-string guitar twang signaling a James Bond movie to The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You” on Friends.

For Dixon, it’s a moment that needs to go beyond typical television sports music. “I think it’s a call to entertain, to do something beyond what would otherwise be a typical sports broadcast. How do we set the tone for that night? How do we create that sense of spectacle that mirrors the entertainment, the excitement that you’re going to see in the game? How do you pull somebody from everyday life and deliver [them] into the show with that kind of energy? It has become that dinner bell that you’re used to hearing before a big primetime game.”