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The anthem that was not on the broadcast (5 min), with captions The story NBC's Sunday Night Football broadcast from Soldier Field in Chicago on November 8...

The anthem that was not on the broadcast (5 min), with captions The story NBC's Sunday Night Football broadcast from Soldier Field in Chicago on November 8 did not carry the national anthem, even though the Chicago Bears had set the night aside for the NFL's Salute to Service campaign. The Bears hosted Tampa Bay in a game that kicked off at 8:20 p.m. Eastern. Veterans Day fell three days later, on Wednesday, November 11. The Bears won 27-24 on a field goal as time ran out. The omission matters because Sunday Night Football is the largest regular audience on American television. By NBC's own count, the program averaged 23.5 million viewers last season, and through eight weeks of this season Nielsen had it at 22.6 million. The Salute to Service campaign, which the night belonged to, has raised 80 million dollars since 2011 by the league's own count. In the minutes the anthem would have aired, the broadcast showed the booth with Noah Eagle and Cris Collinsworth, a pre-game interview with Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, an aerial of flag bearers carrying a folded, field-sized American flag into a tunnel, and the show's theme song, "Waiting All Day for Sunday Night." Whether the anthem was performed inside the stadium is not reported either way. The club had announced tributes, in-game recognitions and themed elements for the night. Armando Salguero of OutKick, who first reported the omission on Monday, wrote that the decision to broadcast the national anthem is not generally made by the NFL and is not a club decision but a network decision. The league sets the campaign and the club sets the stadium ceremony, but the network decides what goes out in the pre-game window. NBC's communications executives, Greg Hughes and Chris McCloskey, had not responded to OutKick's questions about the omission as of publication, and the network has not addressed it since. This is not the first time networks have faced the question. In August 2018, ESPN's president said the network generally had not broadcast the anthem and did not expect that to change that year, and CBS Sports said it did not plan to show the anthem live, consistent with past practices. Fox Sports said that same week it would show the anthem on special occasions including Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and playoff games, while NBC said it had yet to determine its strategy for its 19 broadcasts that season. CBS and Fox aired the anthem live on September 24, 2017, after the president's comments about players who protested, and ESPN aired it on September 11, 2017, and again in October 2017 after the Las Vegas shooting. Two dated occasions are coming. Veterans Day is Wednesday, November 11, a federal holiday, and NBC's next Sunday night game is Pittsburgh at Cincinnati on November 15. Thanksgiving, November 26, is one of the occasions Fox named back in 2018. Whether the anthem reaches the screen remains the network's call. Highlights Highlight In pictures Listen The episode as audio