'You are looking live!' Brent Musburger's NFL legacy is hosting the greatest pregame show ever

ESPN announced Brent Musburger is retiring at the end of the month, ending one of the greatest broadcasting careers ever. For years he has been a big part of college football and basketball coverage for ESPN/ABC, but NFL fans also remember him fondly.

For more than a decade, during a time when there weren’t endless opportunities to read NFL news online and watch pregame programming on Sunday morning, one phrase called all fans to attention …

“You are looking live!”

That was the start of our NFL Sunday for years. From that introduction on, it was time to watch football. Musburger’s simple intro for all the NFL games that day, peeking in on every stadium as “The NFL Today” pregame show started on CBS (just before those graphics, which are so 1986), was as big a part of NFL Sundays as Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor. Although there have been many, many imitators, Musburger led the greatest NFL pregame show ever.

In 1975, Musburger moved from NFL play-by-play to the studio, and “The NFL Today” changed the landscape forever. According to “The NFL in the 1970s: Pro Football’s Most Important Decade,” in 1975 CBS’ producers wanted a show with “more variety and more appeal than any pregame show had done before.” They nailed it.

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Musburger led the show. Former NFL defensive back Irv Cross provided the player’s perspective. Phyllis George, a former Miss America, was a co-host when there weren’t many women involved in sports broadcasting. Early in the show’s run, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was added to the cast to make picks (always slyly making references to who would cover the spread without ever mentioning the line). Musburger herded all those oversized personalities for a fun, informative and lively pregame show. The ESPN “30 for 30” franchise’s “The Legend of Jimmy the Greek” documented the popularity of “The NFL Today,” as well as the time Snyder punched Musburger in a bar in an argument over how much air time he was getting.

When you look around today at all the NFL pregame shows, the great “College GameDay” on ESPN, or other studio shows like TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” know that they all have some roots in “The NFL Today.” CBS’ simple show made the pregame show an event.

NBC tried to compete with “The NFL Today,” though it was Mr. Pibb to CBS’ Dr. Pepper. ESPN started a pregame show and now it’s an all-morning event. Fox has tried to recreate “The NFL Today” formula for years with outlandish personalities. CBS has done the same with its reboot of “The NFL Today.” Many of those shows are done well, but there is only one original “The NFL Today.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, when the NFL’s popularity was skyrocketing, CBS’ pregame show was almost as big of a deal as the games that followed. In the days before the Internet and ESPN’s “NFL PrimeTime,” Musburger also emceed our first look at the highlights from around the league in the halftime and postgame studio show.

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Musburger was fired from CBS in 1990, and rarely showed up in any NFL coverage after that. Even though it has been almost 30 years since Musburger was taking us from stadium to stadium to start our NFL Sunday, fans of a certain age still will get involuntarily excited when they see the old “The NFL Today” intro.

It’s amazing to think about now, but there was a time when an NFL pregame show was a must-see event. That has to be near the top of Musburger’s impressive broadcasting resume.

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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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