Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Been watching this lately. I saw that the show ended in or after 1975. I'll assume due to low ratings. But ESPN, NFL Network and the internet still didn't exist. So how did the fans get to see league wide highlights at that time?

Fans in the 70's always had the halftime highlights on Monday Night Football, which was a huge thing and even if it was a bad game, it kept people watching until halftime just to see highlights of the previous day's games.

As far as NFL Films, I don't know why they cancelled This Week in Pro Football after the 1975 season, but in subsequent seasons they continued to have weekly recap shows but they scrapped the host format, which is probably why they changed it - cost reasons in that they didn't have to pay Summerall and Brookshier. in 1976 the show changed to a single voice over narrator format and was renamed Pro Football Playback, From 1977-79 the show was renamed This is the NFL, which was again rebranded NFL Review and Preview in 1980 and 1981 and again renamed NFL Week in Review from 1982 until I believe 1984. When it became Pro Football Playback and moving forward, it became a half hour show so it was much faster paced and you only had about 90 seconds of highlights for every game.

The NFL Films Game of the Week program continued until 1986, when it was finally ended.

By the 1980s, NFL highlight shows were slowly moving from syndication to cable. Inside the NFL began on HBO in the late '70s, and by the mid-'80s enough households got instant highlights from ESPN that weekly shows such as This Week in Pro Football became obsolete.

Remember that those shows were often broadcast on Saturday, six days after the games had been played. That seemed like an eternity by the time NFL Week in Review ended its run in 1986. Getting highlights Sunday night via NFL Primetime (which started in 1987) was far preferable for most viewers.

Hard to believe, but in some cases, the game clips featured in TWIPF are all that exist for those particular games.

Because TWIPF and the like only showed highlights of Sunday games, there are several Monday night games from the '70s for which no highlights have ever been released. Sometimes team yearbooks contained clips from MNF games, but not always.

Citizen wrote:By the 1980s, NFL highlight shows were slowly moving from syndication to cable. Inside the NFL began on HBO in the late '70s, and by the mid-'80s enough households got instant highlights from ESPN that weekly shows such as This Week in Pro Football became obsolete.

I remember when I was in college in the mid 80's it was an effort for my roommates and I to scrape together ten dollars a month between us to afford HBO during football season just so we could watch Inside the NFL.

Rupert Patrick wrote:I remember when I was in college in the mid 80's it was an effort for my roommates and I to scrape together ten dollars a month between us to afford HBO during football season just so we could watch Inside the NFL.

In the mid/late 80's - I was lucky that my parents let me have my own TV in my room when I was really young - our local cable company messed up when installing our cable at our new house and accidentally gave us HBO for free. Which they didn't notice or correct until I was a senior in high school over a decade later. It was great having "Inside the NFL", must-watch. I still watch it weekly out of habit/tradition but the show (minus still getting NFL Films produced HL's) has gone way downhill ever since it left HBO - and even on HBO it wasn't as good after Dawson and Buoniconti retired.