The system that puts different NFL games on your television than what your relatives across the country are watching on the same channel didn't arrive fully formed. It developed over seven decades of court battles, congressional legislation, network rivalries, and billion-dollar rights deals, each chapter reshaping which games reached which markets and why.
The Chaotic Early Years (1950s)
Before the NFL had anything resembling a unified broadcast strategy, individual teams negotiated their own television contracts with whoever would pay. The result was a patchwork of regional deals that varied wildly from city to city and year to year.
DuMont, a now-defunct fourth network, was an early mover in NFL broadcasting. The network carried NFL games from 1951 through 1955, and during the 1953 and 1954 seasons it aired a Saturday night package, the first time league games had been broadcast coast-to-coast, live, in prime time across a full season. But DuMont's coverage was built on contracts with individual teams rather than the league, and it focused on teams in markets where the network had owned-and-operated stations: the New York Giants, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Washington Redskins. Teams without DuMont deals sold their broadcast rights to local stations, independent producers, or, in some cases, regional breweries looking for a sponsorship vehicle.
This team-by-team approach created obvious inequities. Large-market franchises could command lucrative deals; smaller-market teams struggled to find broadcast partners at all. Green Bay, for instance, had virtually no consistent television presence in the early 1950s, despite fielding competitive teams.
When DuMont ceased network operations in 1956, CBS picked up much of the NFL's broadcast business, but still through a series of individual team arrangements rather than a unified league contract.
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961
The turning point came from an unlikely direction: a federal courtroom and then the United States Congress.
By the late 1950s, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle recognized that a single league-wide television contract, with revenue shared equally among all teams, would make every franchise financially stable regardless of market size. He negotiated a pooled rights deal with CBS in 1961. A federal judge blocked it on antitrust grounds, ruling that competing teams couldn't collectively sell broadcast rights without violating antitrust law.
Rozelle lobbied Congress directly. On September 30, 1961, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act, granting professional sports leagues a specific antitrust exemption to pool and sell broadcast rights as a package. The legislation essentially overruled the court's decision and enabled the modern structure of league-wide television deals.
CBS immediately signed a contract for all NFL broadcast rights at $4.65 million per year, a landmark figure at the time. For the first time, every team's games were distributed through a single, centrally managed broadcast system, with revenue shared equally across the league.
The AFL-NFL Merger and the Conference Split (1970)
The 1961 model covered only the NFL. The rival American Football League, founded in 1960, had struck its own pooled broadcast deal with ABC, then moved to NBC. When the two leagues formally merged in 1970, they brought two separate broadcast relationships with them.
The solution was to divide coverage by conference. CBS, which had broadcast NFL games for nearly a decade, was assigned the National Football Conference. NBC received the American Football Conference. This conference-based broadcast split, NFC games on one network and AFC games on another, defined Sunday afternoon football television for the next 24 years.
The regional elements of this system were significant: because CBS and NBC each had affiliate stations in every major market, viewers in any given city were effectively assigned games based on which conference their local team played in, overlaid with a geographic selection process for games involving teams from other markets.
FOX Rewrites the Rulebook (1994)
The CBS-NFC and NBC-AFC arrangement was considered stable, practically permanent, right up until December 1993, when FOX made one of the most consequential deals in television history.
FOX, then a young fourth network still building its affiliate base, bid $1.58 billion over four years, roughly $395 million per year, for the NFC rights. CBS, the incumbent, offered around $290 million per year, only a modest increase over the roughly $265 million per year it had paid under its outgoing contract, and well short of FOX's number. The NFL accepted FOX's offer.
The fallout was immediate and dramatic. CBS lost its NFL rights entirely after 38 years on the air with the league. Many of the CBS affiliates that had carried NFC games for decades switched to FOX specifically to keep NFL coverage, fundamentally reshaping the affiliate map of American television. FOX went from a network that many stations treated as a secondary option to a primary broadcast destination for a huge portion of the country.
CBS spent four seasons, 1994 through 1997, off the air with no NFL package at all. It re-entered the league's broadcast lineup in 1998, when NBC declined to renew its own deal and CBS won the AFC rights NBC had held since 1965, shifting that conference's games to a new network home.
This is the structure that largely persists today: FOX with NFC games, CBS with AFC games, each carrying Sunday afternoon regional coverage for its respective conference.
The Modern Era and Cross-Flexing
For decades after 1994, the NFC/AFC network split was the foundational rule of Sunday afternoon football on television. That began to change in 2014, when the NFL introduced cross-flexing as a standing tool in its weekly scheduling process.
Cross-flexing allows the NFL to move a game from the FOX schedule to CBS, or vice versa, regardless of conference affiliation. An NFC matchup that CBS would better serve, because it involves teams whose fan bases align with CBS's regional affiliate strengths in a given week, can now be sent to CBS. The reverse applies to FOX.
The league can execute cross-flex moves from Week 1 through Week 16 with two weeks' advance notice, and in Week 17 with one week's notice. The tool became a far bigger part of the schedule starting with the NFL's 2023 media rights deals, which expanded how many games can be cross-flexed each season. The practical effect is that Sunday afternoon is no longer strictly divided by conference. Both networks now air a more balanced mix of high-profile matchups throughout the season.
Where This Leaves Regional Broadcasts
The decades-long arc from DuMont's brewery-sponsored team deals to the NFL's cross-flex era illustrates how regional broadcast splits have always been a function of economics, geography, and competitive media dynamics rather than a fixed technical standard.
What has remained consistent across every era is the basic principle: different markets see different games, and the game in your market reflects a layered set of decisions about network rights, team territories, and the economics of reaching the most relevant audience in each geography.