programming on December 28, 2008, replacing it thereafter with the paid programming block Weekend Marketplace, which is not carried by any Kansas City area station. On September 13, 2014, WDAF began carrying Xploration Station, a live-action educational program block distributed by Steve Rotfeld Productions that is syndicated primarily to Fox stations, on Saturday mornings through an agreement involving Tribune's Fox-affiliated stations. Sports programming WDAF-TV began serving as the unofficial "home" television station of the Kansas City Chiefs in 1965, when NBC obtained the television rights to the American Football League (AFL), which was annexed into the National Football League (NFL) – as the American Football Conference (AFC) – when the two professional football leagues merged in 1970. The station carried most regional or national Chiefs game telecasts aired by NBC through the 1993 season; the local rights to the Chiefs broadcasts transferred to KSHB after it assumed the NBC affiliation from WDAF in September 1994 and remained there until the network's contract with the AFC expired after the 1997 season (KSHB would resume airing certain regular season games involving the Chiefs in 2006, when NBC obtained the rights to the Sunday Night Football package). The loss of primary broadcast rights to the Chiefs by WDAF – one of two Fox affiliates affected by the New World agreement that is located in an AFC market, alongside WJW, which is located in the home market of the Cleveland Browns – differs from the situations in other former New World markets, mainly where it bought or already owned stations that were previously affiliated with CBS, in which the affected stations continued their relationships with a local NFL franchise after they switched to Fox (albeit with brief interruptions in these arrangements in cities such as Milwaukee, Atlanta and Dallas, where Fox's assumption of the NFC rights predated some of the stations' affiliation switches by several months). As a Fox station, since the network obtained partial broadcast rights to the NFL in 1994, Chiefs game telecasts on WDAF during the regular season have been limited to regionally televised interconference games against opponents in the National Football Conference (NFC), primarily those held at Arrowhead Stadium, and since 2014, cross-flexed games originally scheduled to air on CBS in which the team plays against a fellow AFC team. However, Channel 4 held broadcast rights to preseason games involving the team from 1997 to 2001 through a partnership with