PIGSKIN POET.(The Talk of the Town)

This season, ABC will air its final broadcast of "Monday Night Football," the thirty-six-year-old marquee franchise. It's been an entertaining run. From the rantings of Howard Cosell (he eventually left the show, after referring to a black player as a "little monkey"), to Hank Williams, Jr.,'s berserk intros, and, last year, Nicollette Sheridan's nude locker-room embrace, the show's popularity has always derived as much from spectacle as from sport. This year, as a swan song (sixteen swan songs, actually), the network has hired Tim McGraw, the country singer, to perform a customized halftime ditty, which will be rewritten each week to reflect the highlights of the previous day's games.

The song is always sung to the tune of McGraw's 1995 hit "I Like It, I Love It." In the original, McGraw tells of forsaking his manly pastimes in the name of love. He stops watching sports and helps with the housekeeping. For the "M.N.F." version, the producers have replaced the object of McGraw's affection ("that little gal's lovin' ") with more rough-and-tumble pursuits ("pushin' and a-shovin' "). Each Sunday night, a writer named Greg Jennings makes up new lyrics--six rhyming couplets. That gives him only a line or two (and a matter of hours) in which to gloss each game. The result sometimes suggests a work by Gertrude Stein, had Gertrude Stein been a cheerleader: "Always had the horses, now the Colts have a big-time 'D' / Dallas takes a third straight game right up to the fat lady." Or, referring to the Steelers' quarterback: "A little cheese on that Roethlisberger--gonna have to get me some."

One recent Sunday evening, at home in Los Angeles, Jennings was having trouble finding a rhyme for a line he liked: "A rookie Cadillac breaks a fifty-year-old N.F.L. mark." ("Dark"? "Park"? "Lark"?) "To get something really good," he said, "I occasionally have to write myself into a corner."

At seven-thirty, Jennings took part in a conference call with Valerie Fischler and Fred Gaudelli, two "M.N.F." producers, to discuss the next day's song. In the background, a murmur of the game ...