NBC viewers heard a familiar sound on Sunday during\u00a0Football Night in America, in a highlights package from the New York Giants-Washington Commanders game.<\/p>\n
As Maria Taylor recounted Sunday\u2019s tie between the two NFC East rivals, the highlights package was soundtracked by a climactic build-up of low brass and strings that most NFL fans over 30 recognize as \u201cthe ESPN NFL Primetime music.\u201d The iconic cue instantly conjured memories of Chris Berman and Tom Jackson calling the day\u2019s highlights, as they did most of the time during the show\u2019s original run from 1987 to 2005.<\/p>\n
The ESPN \u2018NFL Primetime\u2019 music appears on\u2026 NBC\u2019s \u2018Football Night in America\u2019 for the Giants-Commanders highlight package. \ud83c\udfc8\ud83d\udcfa\ud83c\udfb5\ud83e\udd14 https:\/\/t.co\/4aWHG7JwHm<\/p>\n
\u2014 Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 12, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n The track has been\u00a0experiencing a renaissance lately,\u00a0reappearing in NFL Network <\/a>highlight packages<\/a>. That makes sense, as NFL Network is now under the ESPN umbrella in exchange for the league owning a 10% equity stake in the Worldwide Leader.<\/p>\n But how could NBC Sports use music so intrinsically linked to ESPN and NFL Primetime?<\/p>\n The answer, as you might have presumed, is that ESPN doesn\u2019t own that music.<\/p>\n The song in question, \u201cInternational Statement,\u201d is on the FirstCom Music label<\/a>, owned by Universal Production Music. It\u2019s one of several tracks<\/a> that have since become iconic to NFL fans, used across NFL Countdown and elsewhere over the years.<\/p>\n Because the song is part of a commercial production library, any network can pay the required sync licensing fees to use the same track for its own broadcasts, promos, or highlight packages.<\/p>\n For audiences, it can still be a bit jarring to hear a song they so closely associate with one network or program on another channel. That was the case whenever \u201cRoundball Rock\u201d would show up on Fox channels during college basketball<\/a>.\u00a0In that case, Fox\u00a0had agreed to an exclusive deal<\/a> for the song after NBC stopped using it for NBA coverage, though\u00a0it\u2019s back \u201chome\u201d now<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you heard \u201cInternational Statement\u201d and suddenly felt a wave of nostalgia, NFL Primetime is back largely in its original form as a streaming show on ESPN Unlimited. It was relaunched in 2019 with Berman and Jackson and now features Booger McFarland in the analyst chair<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NBC viewers heard a familiar sound on Sunday during\u00a0Football Night in America, in a highlights package from the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":880343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,39400,369903,216,369904,92],"class_list":["post-880342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-football-night-in-america","tag-highlights-packages","tag-music","tag-nfl-primetime","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}