The WEIRDEST NFL Broadcast in NBC HISTORY | Jets @ Browns (1981)

live nfl trivia every wednesday night on twitch at 9 pm eastern come show off your football knowledge for a chance to win cash prizes check the link in the description to find out more and now on with our feature presentation when you think of the standard nfl broadcast and what the announcement booth looks like about 90 of the time it's gonna look something like this you have two people in the booth give a play by play announcer whose job is to tell you what's going on and describe what's taking place on the field these are your joe bucks your gymnasts and your iron eagles just to name a few then you have a color commentator whose job it is to provide analysis on what's taking place he walks you through the replay talks about schemes talks about tendencies and gives insight as to what just happened these are your troy aikmans your chris collins warts and your tony romos while occasionally you'll see a three-man booth with two color commentators as is the case with one and a football most of the time it's a two-man booth but what about a booth with only one person in it you have a play-by-play person and that's it no one else no color commentator no one breaking down or going over anything that just happened absolutely nothing it's one man trying to fill three hours of space all by himself a one-man booth is incredibly weird and it's hard to imagine something like this working in the nfl but in 1981 nbc tried something absolutely bizarre in a one game experiment they had one announcer and that was it and the end result well it was a disaster this is the story behind one of the strangest broadcasts in nfl history before i talk about the actual broadcast we need some context as to how we got to this point because this was not the first time the nbc tried something unique to understand what one writer dubbed as the singular bowl we need to go back one year to look at the silent bowl here's just a quick rundown of what happened in that game in the final week of the 1980 season the new york jets took on the miami dolphins in a completely meaningless game while the game was actually televised as it was a saturday contest the game had absolutely no implications whatsoever the dolphins enter the game at 8 and 7 and the jets enter the game at 3 and 12 with both teams eliminated from post-season contention convincing people the weekend before christmas to watch a game on a saturday at 12 30 that means absolutely nothing is a bit of a tall order and nbc wanted to try something to boost the ratings for this game and try and get them past cbs executive producer donald meyer have been considering something like this for a while but because of how low stakes the game was he figured this was the perfect opportunity to try out this experiment the jet style for this game was gonna be broadcast without an announcer outside of announcements by orange bowl public address announcer bob kaufman to get the down the distance and occasional appearances by brian gumbel that was it the rest of the game would be completely silent minus the sounds on the field and the end result was somewhat of a mixed bag the jets won the game 24 24-17 but no one was talking about the game all the talk was about the broadcast while it was not a resounding success like some innovative things by no means was it the failure that on paper it probably should have been of the people who called to nbc during the game 60 percent of them were in favor of the announcerless broadcast the ratings were significantly higher than olmeyer expected as people were fascinated by the novelty and even though it's never been replicated again the broadcast still has a pretty positive legacy 40 years later and showed a ton of announcers the importance of not needing to fill the air every single second as it just let things play out when necessary this experiment did exactly what nbc wanted it to do it got people talking and got ratings for an otherwise pointless game and one year later nbc wanted to do something similar this time for their nationally televised saturday afternoon spectacular they were going to try something that was pretty unconventional they opted for a one-man announcer booth usually dick ember and merlin olsen were the top duo at the station and would call the game side by side with ember doing play-by-play and also doing color but for this broadcast it was just gonna be ember nbc spokesman mike cohen seemed excited about this unique idea with cohen saying that this was an opportunity for nbc to improve its audio techniques and graphic capabilities they were going to have four microphones to pick up player and crown noise instead of two they were gonna use seven cameras instead of six they were going to try and do some creative things to help ember out all by himself and this was a pretty important game if they were experimenting with it was a battle between the new york jets and the cleveland browns yes it was pure coincidence that the jets were involved in both of these experiments and while the game didn't mean anything to the browns for the jets they were currently the number five seed sitting pretty with an 851 record they absolutely needed to win this game as with three teams only half a game back on them a loss here would have been detrimental to their season in other words nbc didn't really need a novelty to entice football fans to watch this one as this game was pretty important on its own sure enough the jets won the game it was a tight battle but the jets jumped out to a 14-3 lead at the halftime break thanks to two touchdown passes thrown by richard todd with one being a 28 yarder to lamb jones and the other being a seven yard pass to bruce harper while the jet south end stalled in the second half failing to score a single point the defense held firm and the jets won the game by a final score of 14-13 for the jets the importance of this win cannot be overstated as it set up a win and in situation for the final week of the season and their first shot of the postseason since 1969 which was before the merger even happened but for the purposes of the story we don't really care about what happened on the field we care about what happened off of it with this broadcast and how was this broadcast received it was an absolute disaster something became very apparent when watching this broadcast it felt like any other broadcast except incredibly disjointed one of the most puzzling decisions that nbc made was to have color commentary provided by the players and the coaches themselves in the week leading up to the game roughly 25 players on each team plus the coaches were interviewed questions that they were asked related to what it was like getting ready for the game what their mindset is what happened previous games or the week leading up to the game or just completely random things usual interview topics during the broadcast while there were breaks in the action these segments would play where appropriate and it just resulted in a disjointed mess here's one example involving jet's head coach walt michaels that highlights how choppy this felt walt michaels his responsibilities once the game starts what's he have to do once that ball is in the air well i guess you'd have to say that as the head coach the the overall uh way we're going to operate throughout the football game we get uh i take part with both the offense defensive part of it and make sure that the decisions when they're finally made and the final thing is said and done that won't make us be responsible i don't like any of my assistants to be taking unnecessary responsibilities because after all that is the duties of the head coach having a color commentators that help this story work so much better because they can adjust the speed in which they talk or deliver the story this means if the offense gets to snap off quickly to start a new play or they have a big play they can pause and then resume later on or they can wrap it up quickly but here you have this clip playing while the game is taking place with no clean way to cut out or let ember talk this happened for the entire game it was almost like watching a clip show and also didn't help that there was constant noise ember was either filling all the gaps in between plays or these clips were playing there was no time for breathing room and that was kind of the main takeaway of the announcement of this game that you could take a moment to breathe this broadcast was unorganized chaos but not in a good way and the feedback reflected that the reaction to the announcements game was heavily mixed but again based on the calls that nbc received more people liked it than didn't it was somewhere in that 60 positive range however for this broadcast the reaction was much more negative with 58 of people calling in during the game objecting to nbc's experiment they did not approve of this strategy by the network and the reaction was so poor that nbc never tried anything like this intentionally again as every game from that point on featured a play by play man and at least one color commentator the one-man booth was a failure so that raises the question just from a theoretical standpoint why was this game a flop well i've got a few ideas alright so we have to ask ourselves this important question why did this game fail why did this game get completely forgotten throughout nfl history and why was this game panned compared to the game without any announcers i have three theories in mind that have nothing to do with the actual quality of the broadcast which i've already talked about as being a disjointed mess number one there wasn't really a novelty factor it's human nature to be interested in a novelty for one of two reasons and sometimes it's both we're interested in a novelty because it's never been done before and it's unique or because there's a high probability that this can backfire in spectacular fashion and go down in a blaze of glory in the first category you have things like the first winner classic and the field of dreams game an nhl game played outdoors in the snow that's really cool a baseball game played in a cornfield that's unbelievable in the second category you have things like the nfl broadcast on nickelodeon i know a bunch of people including myself watched that game just because there was a high probability that it was going to be a disaster amazingly enough it was not and was actually incredible i talked about that in a previous video of mine so if you want to learn more about that then click the card in the upper right corner we watch new things because they either look really cool or because they look like they're going to fail and it will be funny to watch and laugh at and the announcement this game fits into both of these categories a game without any announcers not only is that a cool concept that we've never seen before but it might be a really awkward train wreck to watch unfold the one man booth game however it doesn't fit into either one of these categories there's not really a novelty to it or at least not a novelty that's cool or unique a lot of radio broadcasts are just one man even nbc spokesman mike cohen said in the build-up to this game that there wasn't really a novelty here saying that it's gonna be the same as watching a football game in the 1950s in other words if you were an adult watching this game you've seen this before and let's just say there's a reason that we change from a one-man booth to a two-man booth and there's no real possibility for disaster or hilarity like there was with the announcements game dick ember is a pro while not in the nfl he's done one announcer games before so he has experience at this you kind of knew what you were getting here with this broadcast but that's not the only reason that this game failed number two part of the reason why nbc got the negative reaction that they did for this game and why it failed was because nbc did this during a meaningful game when they announced this game happened it was during a meaningless contest neither the jets store the dolphins had anything to play for you can get a bit weird and wacky with a game that no one really cares about and has no implications on anything but a game that has meaning now is not the time to mess around the jets entered this game needing a win as they held the final wildcard spot at the moment but the steelers chargers and chiefs were all only half a game behind you're gonna pick this all important game to try something weird i think a good comparison is something along the lines of preparing a recipe if you want to experiment with a brand new recipe you've been thinking about and want to try that one night for dinner by yourself it's a pretty low steak situation if it works that's awesome but if it doesn't it's not a huge deal you can heat up something you can get something from the pantry you can order takeout or you can go out to eat in other words again not the ends of the world but if you're experimenting with this over thanksgiving dinner in front of the family and it fails miserably oh boy we're gonna have issues that's what nbc did with this experiment in one of the biggest games of the season and that helps to explain the outrage a bit and number three there wasn't really a purpose to this game every experiment should serve a purpose and answer a question with a nickelodeon game it was can we present an nfl broadcast in a way that children will really like with the sky cam it was is this new angle the best way to watch a game with the announcements game it was does the viewing audience need someone telling them what's going on and to announce her serve as great of a purpose as we think they do but with this game what was the purpose was the purpose about not needing color commentary if that was the case then there wouldn't be the incredibly disjointed interviews that took place during the game was the purpose about seeing how one man broadcast will go we already had years and years of that and we know the answer to that question was the purpose an internal one with nbc wanting to send a message to their color commentators or merlin olson to step up their game because they're easily replaceable at least if that was the purpose it would be understandable but it wasn't mike cohen said as much saying this is not a shot at the announcers we think people will find they miss the color men so what was the point what were you trying to prove it was just a completely boneheaded decision that backfired pretty badly the booth as we know it today exists for a reason nbc tried reinventing the wheel and it did not work out at all and more than 40 years later there is a reason they never tried anything like this again and there's a reason why they along with the nfl want you to forget that this game and this broadcast ever happened get your official jaguar gamer 9 merchandise by going to jj9shop.com and be sure to like this video 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