My first game on ABC Sports and Monday Night Football is this Monday at 8 p.m. ET, and it's something I've been looking forward to for a long time. The Houston Texans will play the New York Giants in Canton, Ohio, and I can't think of a better place to start the season.

I'm really excited to get going with Al Michaels, who is the consummate pro, and the whole ABC crew. I've always felt that if you are going to be broadcasting football, sometime in your career you would like to be a part of Monday Night Football, and I've had that feeling for a long time.

Sometimes I wondered if it was ever going to fall or drop right, and it did this year for me after 21 great years of working with Pat Summerall. As I noted before, I've been looking forward to it and it's finally starting in Canton, in a place with all of that football history and tradition. You've got the Pro Football Hall of Fame there, and this weekend, you will have all of the great ex-players around. Heck, it's just going to be a super place to get started.

When you go back and look at the people and events that were big in the building of professional football, you look at Bert Bell and George Halas and Pete Rozelle. The great game in 1958 between Baltimore and the New York Giants was important, as was Joe Namath and the New York Jets winning Super Bowl III. I think Monday Night Football was also big in building the league. Those people and those events all took pro football to a new popularity level.

While I was a coach with the Oakland Raiders many years ago, Monday Night Football got started. I started coaching before MNF, and then I coached in those games and it was always special to us, because all of the players knew that everyone was watching 'em. And I always believed that players like to show off, and we always played well on Monday nights.

When I was coaching, my assistant coaches and I would always be working on Monday night. I would have the guys tell me when it was halftime. Then all of the coaches would come in, and we would sit there and watch Howard Cosell do the halftime highlights of the games played the day before. Remember, they didn't have ESPN and SportsCenter, and all of those highlight shows then. You knew what happened in your game on Sunday, and maybe something you heard locally, but that was it. This was a chance to see what happened around the rest of the league. The other coaches and I would watch those highlights and the start of the third quarter, and then we would go back to work.

Monday's game on ABC will feature an expansion team in Houston taking on a team in the New York Giants, which has more than a 75-year head start on them. New York has tradition and history on its side, while Houston will be making its own history by playing in its first-ever game in franchise history. That's a pretty good combination and a pretty good thing to look forward to Monday night.

In addition to Monday's game, the Hall of Fame induction ceremony takes place Saturday in Canton. Dave Casper, who was a great tight end for me when I coached the Raiders, is going into the Hall, and I have the honor of introducing him for his induction.

I think Casper was the best tight end that ever played, if you define a tight end as half an offensive lineman and half a wide receiver. What I mean by that is if you want to run the ball to the tight end's side of the field, then he has to block like an offensive lineman. And if you want to throw the ball, he has to be able to run pass patterns, get open, and catch the ball like a wide receiver. Dave Casper could do those things better than anyone. He was a great blocker and a great receiver.