They talked about this in the ESPN biography , Those Guys Have All The Fun Inside the World of ESPN . When ABC bought ESPN , the powers that be at ESPN were jackasses to the ABC Sports people including the Monday Night Football production team . I can ' t remember if the production team opted to leave ABCESPN or if they were fired . I ' m guessing they were probably let go . NBC saw the opportunity and hired ABC ' s former MNF production team to do Sunday Night Football . While ESPN was struggling trying to figure out how to run MNF , NBC was producing SNF professionally like clockwork . I also think the person who came up with the NFL television schedule when SNF first started was a disgruntled former ESPN employee and gave NBC the games people were more likely to want to see . SNF has been the NFL gold standard ever since .