News and views as the NFL kicks off another season:
• CBS remains the only network not using sideline reporters during games.
One reason: Most sideline reports aren’t newsworthy, particularly those soft, quickie interviews with harassed coaches at halftime or with players whose commentary is filled with too many “you knows.”
But CBS really needed sideline reporting Sunday during the Broncos- Jaguars game when the wild weather ranged from 93 degrees ( hottest ever for a Jacksonville home game), with a heat index of 105 on the field, to rain and lightning scenarios that delayed the contest for 33 minutes at the start of the fourth quarter.
The network missed important, potentially interesting coverage that was impacting both teams.
Broncos fans probably didn’t fret too much since CBS switched to Houston-Indianapolis coverage that was an end zone battle rather than a dead zone telecast.
• NBC kicked off the season Thursday with the Saints-Vikings battle, producing the largest prime- time NFL audience (27.5 million viewers) since 1996 when ABC “Monday Night Football” covered a Green Bay-Dallas game (31.5 million.) While Nielsen’s ratings and the Elias Sports Bureau don’t keep such statistics, NBC probably set a record for the longest promotional pregame show during the regular season.
Taking advantage of the New Orleans site on the fifth anniversary of Katrina, the network produced an hour-long, somewhat bloated extravaganza with Taylor Swift and the Dave Matthews Band pre-empting Brian Williams and the “NBC Nightly News.”
And Bob Costas may have been involved in a network sports television first. Broadcasting live from New Orleans, Costas not only ballyhooed the NBC schedule but switched to Phil Simms (CBS), Troy Aikman (Fox) and Jon Gruden (ESPN), allowing them to elaborately promote their season schedules.
• Viewers with agile remote thumbs got two views Sunday of Fox Sports studio personality Jimmy Johnson. While Johnson was live on set, dapper as ever, CBS ran several promotional blurbs for the new “Survivor” series premiering Wednesday night.
Johnson, resembling a grizzled hobo, was without a shirt and wearing a bandana in his role as one of the “oldsters” in the upcoming filmed “reality” competition.
Think how cool it would have been if Johnson had showed up Sunday in his “Survivor” attire.
• ESPN begins its “Monday Night Football” season with a double- header featuring the “first team” (Gruden, Ron Jaworski and Mike Tirico) handling the 5 p.m. contest: Ravens at Jets. The second game, at 8:15 p.m., has Trent Dilfer and Brad Nessler in Kansas City for the Chargers-Chiefs meeting.
The latter two replace Mike (Golic) and Mike (Greenberg), whose previous “Monday Night Football” coverage bordered on awful.
The hardball scene.
FSN has added Wednesday’s important 1 p.m. Rockies game with the Padres to its schedule. . . . The sports network should permanently subtract karaoke antics of Tom Helmer when the Rockies win. Forget the gimmickry. There’s enough legitimate celebrating going on. He didn’t sing Sunday.
Hockey news.
87.7 FM The Ticket, Denver’s newest sports talk outlet, is moving into the local play-by- play arena, signing a two-year deal to broadcast all DU hockey games beginning this season.
First of six.
FSN Rocky Mountain, which has won several awards for its Colorado high school football coverage, will cover six Class 5A and 4A contests this fall, beginning with Thursday’s 7 p.m. Arvada West-Cherry Creek meeting.
Quotables on quarterbacks.
“I think I’d like Tim Tebow as a son-in-law but not as a starting NFL quarterback.” — CBS’s Bill Cowher
“If I owned a team, Ben Roethlisberger would not be a starter.” — Fox’s Terry Bradshaw
Tennis wins out over CU game
Someone asked me what I thought of Saturday’s FSN booth coverage of the CU-California game.
Frankly, the Buffs were so bad that even storied broadcasters like Al Michaels and the late Ray Scott couldn’t have made it interesting.
I hoped that either Steve Physioc or Mike Pawlawski would have simply said, “This CU team stinks.”
To find a more competitive sports event, I often switched to CBS for the superb coverage provided by John McEnroe, Dick Enberg and Mary Carillo during the tense U.S. Open battle between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer.
