USD Football 1992

prologue. Boxing evolved into a Friday night fixture, and baseball, as the national pastime, easily sold itself on the small screen. To turn Dunlap's vision to reality, tele– vised football needed a guru, a network executive who had the imagination to marry the sport with technology and create a setting that would ultimately replace the stadium with the living room as the pre– ferred place to watch a game. Football got what it needed in l960, when ABC hired Roone Arledge, a 29-year-old veteran of children's programming, to produce NCAA and AFL football. "From that point forward," says Roberts, "other network coverage simply copied what Arledge did. The philosophy was Arledge's- figuring out a way to attract the average fan." The red-headed, freckled boy wonder from NBC immediately tested the under– pinnings of televised sports coverage and found them wanting. The strength of the medium was not in simply conveying what was happening on the fie ld, he preached. Radio and newspapers could do that. Television had to go a step further. The fan had to be immersed in the game.

He needed to feel the texture of the com– petition, hear the sounds of the struggle in the trenches, understand the strategy of the coaches. In short, Arledge was fond of saying, bringing the game to the viewer was not enough. Television had to bring the viewer to the game. A tall order, but Arledge's imagination seemed limitless. Directional mikes became standard, allowing viewers to hear pads crunching, coaches yelling, and quar– terbacks barking out signals. Over the next few years there would be split screen dis– plays and isolated shots with minicams. The minicam was a favorite of Arledge. Invented by ABC's Bob Trachinger, it put numerous options at the producer's finger– tips in order to fill dead time. A sixty– minute game, after all, amounts to roughly 20 minutes of running, passing and kick– ing, and 40 minutes of setting up. Why watch the huddle, Arledge reasoned, when there are all of those cheerleaders to see "up close and personal?" With the exception of the minicam, ABC did more adapting than inventing. Arledge used mostly off-the-shelf technology to embrace his philosophy. Videotape, for example, was used by NBC as early as

1956. Three years later, pre-Arledge ABC captured college football highlights on videotape and replayed them at halftime. But Arledge saw videotape's quick . turnaround as the seed that would grow into the most exciting development in the history of television sports coverage: the instant replay. In 1961, ABC used slow– motion replays for analysis during half– time of the Texas-Texas A&M game. The ability to educate the viewer was begin– ning to take shape. The following fall, Boston College quarterback Jack Concannon's 79-yard touchdown run against Syracuse was played over for announcer Paul Christman to dissect. Yet the "instant" wasn't quite there. Turnaround time was still relatively slow because the taping had to take place back at ABC's studio in New York. To Arledge's chagrin, it was CBS' Tony Verna who figured out a way to identify the portion of tape he wanted to replay by keying on the sounds it made in his earset when he played it back. Verna picked the Army-Navy game on December 7, 1963, to showcase his devel– opment. He was so tight-lipped about his plans that only announcer Lindsey Nelson

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