Carrie Underwood has sung the intro for NBC’s Sunday Night Football for 13 straight seasons, but she’s never revealed how the process actually works.

Sure, the network knows which matchups they’ll have at the start of the season. But midway through, games can “flex” into the primetime Sunday night slot if they’re more exciting than the originally scheduled matchup.

Then there’s playoff football, which can throw a wrench into everyone’s plans. Underwood is a busy woman, and filming takes time and resources. There’s no way she could go week to week with it … right?

Carrie Underwood Sunday Night Football History

The reality is simpler but so much more work. Talking to Highway Mornings with Cody Alan, Underwood broke down the process.

• In 2013, Underwood followed Faith Hill as the official voice of the Sunday Night Football intro.
• Hill had the job from 2006 to 2012. Before her, Pink did it.
• While “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night” (a spinoff on Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You”) is the most popular intro song, it’s not the only one. A takeoff of Underwood / Miranda Lambert‘s “Somethin’ Bad” called “Oh, Sunday Night” debuted in 2016. In 2018, she switched to an original called “Game On.”

The first step is laying down the basic arrangement, which stays mostly the same each year, aside from a few modern updates.

“And then we’ll go and film it, and that usually takes a day of my time,” she says.

The NFL will also start going city to city to film players, teams and B-roll for each unique matchup. Part of this process is predicting which players will still be healthy and relevant when SNF comes to town.

“And then I go back into the studio and I’ll record every combination,” Underwood adds.

Easy enough, right? The postseason usually isn’t settled until the very last snap of the football season, and only then is each game distributed to a television network or streamer. NBC knows it will have a set number of games — but which teams will play in them can’t be predicted.

How Much Is Carrie Underwood Paid for Sunday Night Football?

“Once we get into playoffs it’s like we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she concedes.
“So, first I do all of the Sunday night schedule and then I do any combination of anybody who could ever possibly play each other in the playoffs.”

Much like T-shirts made for the losing team at the Super Bowl, Underwood makes vocal intros for teams that don’t stick around long enough to hear it. Over the years there must be dozens if not hundreds of intros in the digital trash!

At least she’s well-compensated. Actually, not so much. Despite rumors that Underwood makes $1 million a week for singing the song, she says it’s closer to $0.

“It’s pretty pro bono,” Underwood she told Howard Stern in 2023, shocked by the suggestion that she’s making $18M a year. “I wish! That would be great, that would be awesome!”