NBC College Football Game of the Week

The NBC College Football Game of the Week refers to nationally televised broadcasts of Saturday afternoon college football games that were produced by NBC Sports, the sports division of the NBC television network in the United States. Bowl games were always exempt from the NCAA's television regulations, and the games' organizers were free to sign rights deals with any network. In NBC's case, the 1952 Rose Bowl at the end of that particular season was the first national telecast of a college bowl game.[1]

Background

NBC first televised college football on September 30, 1939. NBC broadcast the game between Waynesburg and Fordham on station W2XBS (which would eventually become NBC's flagship station, WNBC) with one camera and Bill Stern[2] was the sole announcer. Estimates are that the broadcast reached approximately 1,000 television sets.[3] Twelve years later, the first live regular season college football game to be broadcast coast-to-coast aired on NBC.[4][5] The game in question, was Duke at the University of Pittsburgh on September 29, 1951.

Pretty soon on June 6,[6] 1952, NBC Head of Sport Tom Gallery[7] led negotiations towards a one-year[8] football contract[9] (for $1,144,000[10]) with the NCAA. The contract incidentally came about after the 1951 NCAA convention voted 161-7 to outlaw televised games except for those licensed by the NCAA staff. The deal[11] allowed NBC to select one game a week[12] to broadcast on Saturday afternoons, with the assurance that no other NCAA college football broadcast would appear on a competitive network. In the first college football game to be broadcast under this new NCAA television contract, on September 20, Kansas defeated TCU 13-0.

By 1953, the NCAA allowed NBC to add what it called "panorama" coverage of multiple regional broadcasts for certain weeks – shifting national viewers to the most interesting game during its telecast.[13] After NBC lost its college football contract following the 1953 season, they carried Canadian football in 1954. NBC regained college football rights in 1955 and aired games through the 1957 season.

Even after dropping regular season college football, NBC continued to carry postseason football. NBC carried the Blue–Gray Football Classic, an all-star game, on Christmas Day, until dropping the game in 1963 as a protest of the game's policy of segregation.[14] It consistently served as the Rose Bowl's television home until 1988 and added the Sugar Bowl from 1958 to 1969 (which replaced the network's coverage of the Cotton Bowl Classic).

Commentators

Play-by-play

Color commentary

Red Grange (top) with broadcast partner Lindsey Nelson for NBC's NCAA Game of the Week coverage, 1955.
  • Leo Durocher (1956; with Lee Giroux on west coast regional games)
  • Bill Flemming (1957; with Mel Allen)
  • Lee Giroux (1957; with Chick Hearn)
  • Red Grange (1955-1957; with Lindsey Nelson)
  • Charley Harville (1957; with Jim Simpson on southeast games)
  • Bill Henry (1952)
  • Bill Munday (1953)
  • Lindsey Nelson (1953; with Mel Allen)
  • Bill Voights (1956; with Mel Allen on midwest regional games)

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Rose Bowl Game History — KTLA". Archived from the original on 2008-03-08. Retrieved 2008-05-28.
  2. ↑ "BILL STERN (Audio) - Gold Time Radio - Jim Ramsburg". Jim Ramsburg.
  3. ↑ "First televised football game, Waynesberg vs Fordham, 1939". American Sportscasters Online. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
  4. ↑ Pedersen, Paul M.; Parks, Janet B.; Quarterman, Jerome; Thibault, Lucie, eds. (2011). Contemporary Sport Management (4th ed.). Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-7360-8167-2. Retrieved 2012-03-25.
  5. ↑ Watterson, John Sayle. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. p. 270.
  6. ↑ Branch, Taylor (October 2011). "The Shame of College Sports". The Atlantic.
  7. ↑ "NBC acquires rights to NCAA football". NBC Sports History Page.
  8. ↑ Weber, Bruce (May 27, 2015). "Walter Byers, Ex-N.C.A.A. Leader Who Rued Corruption, Dies at 93". New York Times.
  9. ↑ Fleisher, Arthur A. (53). The National Collegiate Athletic Association: A Study in Cartel Behavior. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ↑ Zimbalist, Andrew. Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports. p. 94.
  11. ↑ Wolters, Larry (June 12, 1952). "June 12, 1952 - TELEVISION NEWS AND VIEWS". Chicago Tribune.
  12. ↑ Byers, Walter. Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes. pp. 79–96. JSTOR 10.3998/mpub.14486.
  13. ↑ "Why Football on TV is Limited". Look. October 20, 1953(The "primary purpose is to reduce the impact of the television upon game attendance")
  14. ↑ "Blue-Gray Telecast Is Killed". The Anniston Star. Anniston, Alabama. UPI. November 9, 1963. Retrieved June 1, 2017 – via newspapers.com.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.