‘You are looking live’: On Sunday, CBS throwing back to origins of ‘The NFL Today’

The nostalgia economy is big business these days — wait, Oasis is touring again? — and Sunday’s episode of CBS’s “The NFL Today” is going to play heavy into looking back, even as “you are looking live” at the Week 3 games.

The NFL Today revamped its cast and format 50 years ago and those changes ushered in a new era for a sports studio show. In celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the 1975 version, Sunday’s The NFL Today episode at noon ET will have the feel as if you were watching the show in 1975.

Among the cool touches:

• Brent Musburger, who famously hosted the show from 1975 to 1990, will join the show for the full hour alongside regulars James Brown, Nate Burleson, Bill Cowher and Matt Ryan;

• The set and graphics will be recalibrated so it looks like you are watching in 1975;

• CBS’s NFL broadcasters will dress up as if they were calling games in the year “Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain & Tennille topped the Billboard charts and “The Godfather II” won Best Picture.

CBS’s NFL game coverage on Sunday will also have throwback elements sprinkled in the broadcasts. Content will appear on CBS Sports HQ, CBSSports.com, and CBS Sports’ social platforms including Instagram, X, TikTok and YouTube, if you don’t watch the The NFL Today show via linear means.

The NFL Today’s lead producer, Drew Kaliski, said the genesis of the idea came last February shortly after the conclusion of Super Bowl LIX. During the usual postmortem meetings held by broadcast networks after a sports season, CBS Sports senior vice president of programming Dan Weinberg suggested doing a The NFL Today throwback show to honor the anniversary. By March, those who work on The NFL Today weekly had some concrete ideas about what they could do.

JP LoMonaco, who oversees all of the design, production, and execution of graphics for CBS Sports, said his team spent hours on YouTube watching The NFL Today from 1975 to the early 1980s to get a sense of what the visuals and graphics looked like at that time.

“You start with the obvious — you want your screen to look like that timeframe,” LoMonaco said. “So, the name fonts and matchups are going to look very similar to what you saw back then. We will work in some fun things like a cold open, just using the CBS eyeball. We’re doing our best to get you into a time machine and head back to 1975.”

LoMonaco said it was fairly easy to stylistically match fonts and typefaces from the old days, but what was difficult was downgrading the quality of the overall graphics so that it would look like 1975.

“His group was showing me graphics, and my response was ‘It has to be uglier,’” Kaliski said, laughing.

How did the modern version of The NFL Today come to be? Robert J. Wussler, who became the head of CBS’s sports coverage in the mid-1970s, wanted to fuse sports presentation with entertainment programming sensibilities and rebooted The NFL Today in 1975.

That initial cast consisted of Musburger, Phyllis George, a former Miss America, and the former NFL defensive back Irv Cross. (George and Cross were pioneers — the first woman and the first Black man on a live sports studio show.)

In 1976, Mike Pearl became the show’s producer (they also had a young director in Bob Fishman, who would become one of the most accomplished directors in sports television history) and hired Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder as a commentator. “The Greek” made game predictions, but he did not offer point spreads because the NFL did not want to be linked to gambling, which is an absolutely hilarious sentence to write today.

The NFL Today was revolutionary as a live pregame show. For instance, The NFL Today was the first pregame show to have game broadcasters appearing in real-time from stadiums during the pregame show, so viewers had a sense of what was happening at stadiums before a game. Kaliski said looking at show archives from 1975 to 1981, he was blown away by the access they received.

“Imagine today saying, ‘Hey, Patrick Mahomes, you want to go out to a restaurant with us and sit down with James Brown?’ That ain’t happening,” Kaliski said. “But back in the day, Roger Staubach or Terry Bradshaw would go with them for dinner, and they’d invite The NFL Today people over to their houses and everyone would see them intermingling with their children. Phyllis George and Jayne Kennedy led the charge on those interviews. It’s amazing with all these platforms today, we don’t get that one-on-one access that they got 50 years ago.”

Kaliski said Sunday’s show will feature many great moments from The NFL Today over the years, but the show has to navigate with giving viewers details on Week 3 of the 2025 NFL season. Do not expect the show to go over Musburger being let go by CBS in 1990, nor Snyder being fired by CBS Sports for racist comments in 1988.

In many ways, it is remarkable that a sports show with origins so many decades ago remains on air today. If you want a current indication of viewership, the Sept. 14 edition of “The NFL Today” averaged 3.041 million viewers. The show went on the road to Green Bay for the first week of the season and will be back on the road again next week for the Ravens at Chiefs.

“I remember watching Brent, Irv, Phyllis, and Jimmy the Greek as a kid and when I hear Brent say “You are looking live….” with us as we start on Sunday, I’m going to be feeling it,” Kaliski said. “I know it will be very cool for a lot of football fans out there. Maybe some kids today can’t relate to it but when you hear that from Brent, I know it’s going to hit me hard, and I hope it hits a lot of others people hard too.”

(Top photo of the CBS NFL Today Show crew: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)