|
|
STAN ISAACS Out of Left Field |
 |
of the TITANS: at Super Bowl #1 |
Classic duel between TV networks
nearly matched Packers vs. Chiefs
By
STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Once
upon a time there was a Super Bowl that was truly a Super Bowl.
That wasn't a Super Bowl merely between two pro football teams.
No, that was a time when two networks went head-to-head televising
the same game.
This was Jan. 17, 1967. It was the first Super Bowl. The teams
were the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The football
folk made a big to-do about the fact that this was the first
meeting between the established National Football League (the
Green Bays) and the upstart American Football Conference (the
Kansas Citys). But above and beyond that, and probably a good
deal more fun, was the TV phenomenon by which both CBS and NBC
televised the game.
This came about as a compromise to solve the TV aspact of the
peace pact between the NFL and AFC. When the leagues came together
it was decided that both CBS and NBC would televise the first
game. CBS, which televised NFL games, would have exclusive rights
to the 1968 and 1970 games, while NBC would have exclusive rights
to the 1969 game. The networks paid $1 million each for the dual
telecast opportunity in 1967, and $2.5 million each for the exclusive
telecasts. This was before Monday Night Football and ABC, and
cable-TV's entry into the mix. Today the networks pay billions
for multi-year pro football contracts.
A singular aspect of that first telecast was the decision to
allow CBS to do all the production work because of the relatively
short preparation for the game following the peace pact and the
expense of doing two productions.
This
was the lineup of announcers in the Epic Battle of the Networks:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chet Simmons, then an executive at NBC, recalled: "There
was great tension at the networks about the dual telecasts. CBS
was given the production assignment because they had been with
the more established NFL. There was so much tension that it almost
got out of hand. I remember a meeting where we decided that we
had better pull back and just try to cooperate and make the best
of it."
|
|
 |
Ray Scott, who regularly did Minnesota Vikings games on radio, said, "In 30 years of broadcasting I had never seen people so desperate over ratings. You heard talk of arsenic and jumping off bridges at CBS if we lost in the ratings."
While Green Bay was a 13-point favorite on the field of play, CBS was established as a five-point favorite in the TV ratings game. That meant that in order for CBS to beat NBC, it had to score more than five points in the Nielsen ratings. That was because CBS was the old established network on pro football, and, more significantly, it ostensibly had the loyalty of viewers in major TV market cities: Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
CBS charged sponsors $85,000 a minute for a commercial; NBC charged $70,000 a minute. This year CBS is charging close to $2 million for a 30-second commercial spot.
The networks went all-out promoting their telecasts for two weeks. CBS devoted 75 per cent of its nightime promos and 50 per cent of its daytime spots to Super Week. NBC squeezed every ounce of promotional material it could out of Gowdy and Christman. Christman, the first of the perceptive analysts, was particularly popular at the time, though he probably would be considered somewhat lazy by the standard of today's more voluble practitioners of the fine art of dissecting game action to a faretheewell.
Simmons recalled that NBC was so frustrated at not being able to do its own production work that it devised a gimmick of taking a picture of the CBS picture in its own truck just so that it could have something different.
"Say, there was a close play on the sideline," he said. "We would take a picture of the guy's foot and blow it up."
Bill MacPhail, then president of CBS sports, recalled that NBC missed the second-half kickoff because it failed to come out of commercial.
Such was the frantic nature among some TV people that NBC ordered special surveys of the viewers, so it could have a halftime rating of the telecasts. Pete Rozelle, NFL commissioner, said, "I remember some talk from some network executives about their being ahead. I don't remember which it was."
Green Bay won the game, 35-10. There was no accepted consensus about which network did a better job artistically. After a good deal of whim wham over the early Nielsen figures--the rating service admitted to some mistakes in its first compilations--CBS earned a 22.6 rating to NBC's 18 (the percentage of the nation's TV sets tuned in) for a 4.6 edge.
No surprise, each network claimed victory. NBC said that while CBS had a higher percentage of homes tuned in, its figures showed that a higher number of viewers per set were credited to NBC homes. It said its greatest strength was among "young adult" viewers (18-49), meaning the big spenders or, in the case of beer, the biggest guzzlers.
To NBC's boast that its sponsors got a bargain because they wound up paying $2.97 per thousand viewers to CBS' advertisers $3.10 per thousand, CBS had an answer. "All that apparently happened is that NBC underestimated the popularity of the Super Bowl and sold its coverage for too little money, while we realized how popular the game (and our coverage) would be and sold the coverage to advertisers at reasonable rates."
Nobody seems to have underestimated the financial lure of the Super Bowl since then.
The NFL rakes in billions of dollars from the networks now because the Super Bowl has become a national holiday, and invariably draws one of the highest TV audiences of each year. Four Super Bowls are on the list of the top 10 highest rated TV shows of all time. The record rating was 49.1, set by the 1982 telecast of the San Francisco-Cincinnati game. It stands No. 4 on the all-time ratings list.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. Images are from ISMI's Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA 94901-5506, USA.
You can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |