Our favorite new commercial to debut during the return of football-filled weekends has got to be the latest from State Farm Insurance. It is the one where they compare a real athletic trainer with pop star Meghan Trainor. The singer interacts with Kansas City Chiefs quarterback--and long-time State Farm commercial star--Patrick Mahomes. At one point, the singer does the classic stage performer move of shouting into her mic, “Give it up for Patrick, everybody!"

Then Trainor delivers the knockout line: “He does Sports!"

The return of football, both College and Pro, reminds us of the essential nature of sports on television, and sports to television, both as live programming--and as an indispensable part of the business model.

And while all sports matter in that consideration, none matter more than (insert the basso profundo voice of the late John Facenda here) the National Football League.

For better or worse, the NFL has dominated television viewing for longer than we can remember. NFL games are usually the top-rated programs of each TV season. The argument can be made that getting the rights to broadcast the NFL is what truly made FOX a major network. And the current television rights deals to carry NFL games are reportedly worth an average of $10 billion a year, until 2033.

Just look at how the league orchestrated its opening weekend of the regular season. 

First, there was the Thursday night game, a bonus to NBC’s very successful Sunday Night Football package, which, for our money, is still the best game production package in our view. Mike Tirico and Chris Collinsworth still bring more to the old Pat Summerall—John Madden vibe to the press box than any other play-by-play team out there. The NFL schedulers, who never miss an opportunity to have a marquee matchup worth showcasing, smartly sent “America’s Team,” which seems to be posing as an uncredited male version of “The Real Housewives of Wherever,” to take on the defending blue-collar talking, Cheesesteak-eating, tush-pushing Super Bowl Champions, the Philadelphia Eagles.

Then there was the oddity of a foreign Friday night game, both from a standpoint of where it was held and where it was shown. The NFL office clearly thought that they needed a September visit to São Paulo, Brazil, to showcase “American Football” in a different country.  Thus, we ended up with the Kansas City Chiefs (sadly without their Tight End’s famous fiancée) looking like they didn’t realize that this wasn’t a meaningless preseason tilt against the very ready-to-play Los Angeles Chargers. The Chiefs were beaten by a Jim Harbaugh squad looking to prove they won’t be taken for granted in the AFC West.

But given that this game was available only as a live stream on YouTube, there was so much else about it that was worth taking note of. Not that the talent didn’t try to remind us of the game’s groundbreaking-ness at every opportunity. Apparently, the folks at NBC Sports were involved to keep all those YouTubers from mucking around too much with the sanctity of the NFL’s tightly controlled imagery of pro football. But there were enough influencers like “IShowSpeed", “Deestroying”, and “Haileyybailee” to appease the younger demos that the league was looking to prove it “gets their vibe” to.

And they didn’t go crazy in the booth, turning to the vanilla, but reliable team of Rich Eisen and Kurt Warner to call the game in a fashion that old football purists wouldn’t shout “What is this shit” at their screens. Ratings released on Monday suggest that 17 million people tuned in—or rather, streamed in—to watch the game. (Though broadcasters have thrown a “challenge flag” on the accuracy of that figure.)

By the time Sunday at Noon rolled around, it was business as usual for football fans. CBS and FOX returned their popular pre-game shows to the air with the usual suspects, though CBS took its show on the road to the football cathedral of Lambeau Field in Green Bay to highlight the network’s marquee afternoon game between the Lions and Packers. FOX, which pretty much invented taking the Sunday pre-game show on the road, stayed in their amazing augmented reality studio for their first show of the new season.

The games were mainly underwhelming on the “Kickoff Weekend” (presented by YouTubeTV, which now carries the pay-per-game product known as NFL Sunday Ticket). But leave it to the channel for the truly ADD-fueled football fan, NFL RedZone, and its marathon-man host, Scott Hanson, to keep us interested in all of the games by whipping around through all of them for seven hours or so.

News purists will likely think we are crazy for saying this, but watching NFL RedZone on any given Sunday is truly a masterclass in handling live coverage of multiple breaking news stories. Studying the approach of the production on any Sunday can be truly helpful in understanding how to navigate a chaotic situation in real time. If you’ve never watched RedZone in its 16 seasons, make it a point to do so and study how they do things. Even the somewhat controversial addition of commercials to the telecast didn’t hurt it that much in our view.

It may take a moment to come down from the adrenaline rush you will get from being exposed to that many different live football games at the same time. One way to do that is by watching the NBC Sunday Night Pre-Game show. For as good as we think NBC’s game production is, we find their hours before the game to be just OK. They do all of the things you want in a show to recap the day in the NFL and get you excited for the last game in the evening.

For our money, we still have a warm spot in our hearts for the OG of Sunday evening football shows, ESPN’s NFL PrimeTime. (Full disclosure, we worked at ESPN when “PrimeTime” debuted and played a small part in its creation.) Our position is simple: if you're hosting a highlight show, make it fun to watch by understanding the recipe for including not just the great plays from each game, but also some of the not-so-great ones you want to feature. And you need someone who loves the game and can have fun delivering the highlights. Love him or not, host Chris Berman has been that guy since the show’s debut in 1987. As “Boomer” would tell you (and yes, that is what he is called by everyone he works with), “it’s just a couple of guys watching all the games and then telling you about them. Plus, maybe having a little fun.” His partner, Booger McFarland, has filled the role that the late, great Tom Jackson created at the show’s start, some 38 years back.

Even now, as a show seen only via ESPN’s digital platform and truncated in length so as not to step on NBC’s Sunday night game, NFL PrimeTime is unabashedly two guys sitting at a desk and talking about a day of football. But they still do it in a way that makes it “a football highlight institution."

Finally, the football weekend bleeds over into Monday and wraps up with another institution, and that is ESPN’s Monday Night Football.

While “MNF” doesn’t have the original ABC cast of characters that Roone Arledge brought together some 55 years ago, ESPN has kept the franchise in the forefront by spending the money to lure Joe Buck and Troy Aikman over from being the lead play-by-play team at FOX and supporting them with a first-rate production team that definitely delivers a close second to the quality and class of NBC’s Sunday Night offering. We admit to still missing the foghorn rants of Howard Cosell, the “aw-shucks” comedy of “Dandy” Don Meredith, and the attempts by Frank Gifford to actually call the game. But the current-day version of “Monday Night Football” still provides the cure for the “Weekend full of football hangover” that many still have after going back to work on Monday morning.

(Especially after a week one fantastic come-from-behind win for our hometown Vikings over the Bears in Chicago. Skol!)

Yes, Football is back. And our position is that the television business is always better when it is.

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