ESPN cameras were focused on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes as the couple stood on the FedEx Field turf just before ESPN’s first regular-season “Monday Night Football” game in September 2006.

Cruise and Holmes were guests of Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, but for ESPN executives, they provided the perfect imagery as the network took control of the high-profile NFL series. The presence of the Hollywood stars recalled the early days of “Monday Night Football,” when celebrities like John Lennon and John Wayne would drop by the booth and banter with the announcers, creating watercooler talk for the next day.

For more than three decades, “Monday Night Football” was the NFL’s biggest weekly event, and ESPN executives were eager to put their own stamp on it—so much so that ESPN’s John Skipper advocated dumping Hank Williams Jr.’s “Are You Ready for Some Football?” intro before ESPN’s Norby Williamson talked him into keeping it.

The Disney-owned network followed the historical playbook. It hired Tony Kornheiser to fill the Howard Cosell role, and it planned a steady stream of celebrity interviews and cultural touch points that only tangentially dealt with football.

It would be the perfect mix of ESPN’s hip and brash style with the pop-culture traditions of “Monday Night Football.” The series had just ended a 36-year run on ABC but had floundered at the end of it. Its final year on ABC, in 2005, saw the series’ lowest rating, a 10.8 average. More importantly, the franchise produced far less buzz. ESPN was set to change that, and the opening night just outside of Washington was going to be the start of that new era.

On the surface, the move was smooth. Ad sales were robust, and ESPN’s ratings, while lower than ABC’s, still dwarfed everything else on cable.

But cracks showed immediately. Kornheiser did not mesh with fellow analyst Joe Theismann, and ESPN’s slate of games was much less compelling than NBC’s new Sunday-night prime-time schedule.

Viewers and critics panned the forced celebrity interviews. In its first year, following a bizarre booth appearance by actor Christian Slater, CNN.com posted a column titled “Why I Hate ‘Monday Night Football,’” which cited “over-the-top plugs for ABC and annoying celebrity interviews.”

ESPN wasn’t deterred and kept interviewing celebrities into its second season, culminating in a ribald October 2007 appearance by comedian Jimmy Kimmel that was bashed by critics and ESPN executives after he took cheap shots at Kornheiser and his then-former colleague Theismann. Ron Jaworski had replaced Theismann after the 2006 season.

“We got ourselves excited that we had to recapture the glory of ‘Monday Night Football’ and bring guests to the booth and do all this bigger-than-just-football stuff,” said Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president of content. “I recently have come to believe that when ‘Monday Night Football’ did all that stuff, it was a different world. There were only three channels, and you were fighting for a big piece of a pie. Most of the people that come now are football fans.”

And all of the people in the booth now are football experts. This past off-season, ESPN chose former coach Jon Gruden to replace humor/sportswriter Kornheiser, further emphasizing its move toward all things football. Last week, Gruden agreed to a multiyear extension to stay at ESPN.

“If you have Gruden in the booth with Jaworski, it’s common sense that you’re going to dive into the execution and the strategy of the game in front of you,” said Williamson, ESPN’s executive vice president of production.