Song - Pure Glam
Artist(s) - Eric Cunningham, Chris Lang
Released - 1999
Primetime Usage - 2006
Contained on - Chronic Trax CM014 (Chronic Rocks, Vol. 1)
Featured Highlight - AFC Divisional Round Preview (from Wild Card Sunday Episode), 2006
After ESPN traded Sunday Night Football for Monday Night Football following the 2005 season, they lost the exclusive long-form highlight rights to the Sunday NFL day games that led to the launch of the show in the first place. What followed (until ESPN+ New Primetime began in 2019) was what I like to call the "Purgatory Primetime" era. During this era (2006-18), almost all of the real NFL Primetime broadcasts aired during the postseason. There was still a show called "NFL Primetime," but it was a bastardized version that aired Monday afternoons without Chris Berman or Tom Jackson. The closest thing left for NFL Primetime junkies was The Blitz, a Primetime-like segment hosted by Berman & TJ (& others like Trent Dilfer) during Sunday evening SportsCenter that featured shorter highlights and longer talking segments. The Blitz was passable—and both it and the Monday NFL Primetime used the classic music everyone reading this blog is more than familiar with—but things still weren't the same compared to the pre-2006 NFL world.
The 2006 postseason marked the first real return of NFL Primetime since the end of ESPN's Sunday Night Football. Aside from ditching the 2005 title song and returning to the 1998-04 piece, the episodes looked and felt just like the ones from the previous year's playoffs. One quirk, however, was the addition of several new non-highlight tracks. The first, the most interesting, and the only one that's been identified as of this post, is "Pure Glam" by Chronic Trax co-founder Eric Cunningham and "Blow the Stack" co-composer Chris Lang (assuming it's the same Chris Lang). It was used one time for each Wild Card episode and also once in the Conference Championship show. Below is Pure Glam's accompaniment of the AFC Divisional Round preview late in the Sunday Wild Card episode. Special thanks to Godzfire for identifying this song.
