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| Date | December 20, 1980 | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Stadium | Miami Orange Bowl Miami, Florida | ||||||||||||||||||
| Favorite | Dolphins by 6 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Referee | Fred Silva | ||||||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 41,854 | ||||||||||||||||||
| TV in the United States | |||||||||||||||||||
| Network | NBC | ||||||||||||||||||
| Announcers | None | ||||||||||||||||||
Theannouncerless game was anAmerican football contest played on December 20, 1980, between theNew York Jets and theMiami Dolphins of theNational Football League. As an experiment, theNBC television network broadcast it without assigning anycommentators to cover it. The two teams were playing the last game ofthat season for them as neither had qualified forthe playoffs, and since the game was being broadcast nationally NBC executiveDon Ohlmeyer decided on the idea to boost what would otherwise have been weakratings. The Jets won a 24–17upset victory.[1]
To replace the announcers, the network used more on-screengraphics than usual and asked thepublic address announcer at theMiami Orange Bowl stadium to impart more information than he typically did. Efforts to use more sensitive microphones and pick up more sound from the field, however, did not succeed. While the experiment did increase the telecast's ratings, it was widely regarded as a failure since it did not provide sufficient context for viewers. No network, cable or internet broadcaster of any major U.S. professional sports team tried an announcerless game broadcast again, except through alternate feeds of games offered without announcers,[2] until a July 3, 2022, baseball game onPeacock between theRoyals andTigers.
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Don Ohlmeyer, thenexecutive producer ofNBC'stelecasts ofNational Football League (NFL) games, began considering doing a telecast without announcers early inthe 1980 season. Ohlmeyer had long believed that the announcers were overly chatty and did not let the game speak for itself when they needed to. Additionally, while NBC primarily covered the games of the NFL'sAmerican Football Conference (AFC) teams, it was earningratings almost as good as those of rivalCBS, who at the time was broadcasting games involving teams from theNational Football Conference (NFC). A game without announcers might well attract enough viewers to put NBC past CBS.[1]
In October of that year, reports began to circulate that Ohlmeyer was considering the idea. He confirmed it but said he would only actually do it for a game that had noplayoff implications. The last week of the season gave him the chance, with a contest scheduled for Saturday, when it would be shown nationally, between theNew York Jets and theMiami Dolphins.[3]
Although both teams had already been eliminated from the playoffs, they had reasons to win beyond ending their seasons on an upbeat note. The Dolphins, hosting the Jets at theMiami Orange Bowl, their home stadium at the time, had the better record at 8–7.Las Vegas oddsmakersmade them 6-point favorites. Despite that line, however, they had not only lost to the Jets earlier that season, a loss that was widely believed to have been the one that put the Dolphins out of the playoffs since the Jets had been the only team the Dolphins lost to that they had been expected to beat. That loss had been their fifth straight to theirAFC East divisionrivals; Miami had not beaten the Jets since 1977 despite an otherwise superior record during those seasons. The Dolphins were also bringing a three-gamewinning streak into the contest; a victory would redeem their failure to reach the playoffs with a winning record for the season.[3]
Coming into the game at 3–12, the Jets, touted byJimmy the Greek at the beginning of the season as a possibleSuper Bowl contender, had long abandoned any hopes of the playoffs. But they, too, had something to prove. The visitors were coming off an embarrassing loss at home to theNew Orleans Saints, the only team in the league with aworse record, who had come from behind late in the game for their only victory of the season. The team's owners were reportedly divided as to whether to retain head coachWalt Michaels for another season.[4]
Reaction was mixed, ranging from "good-natured humor to applause to some surprising anger," asBryant Gumbel would later put it on air shortly before the telecast started.[5] "My first reaction was of incredible nerve, nervousness,"Dick Enberg, one of the NBC announcers, recalled toESPN 30 years later. "We all gathered together, hoping that Ohlmeyer was dead wrong ... What if this crazy idea really worked?" Dolphins'defensive endBob Baumhower was also apprehensive about what viewers might overhear among the players. "I hope we're all extra careful," he said. "There's a lot of extra talking going on out there that people don't realize."[3]
The game started at 12:30 p.m. The weather was seasonal for Miami, with temperatures around 69 °F (21 °C) and 12-mile-per-hour (19 km/h) winds. A total of 41,854 came to see the game at theOrange Bowl, meaning the game wasblacked out in south Florida.[6]
Miami took an early lead with a 21-yardUwe von Schamannfield goal. After the Jets'Scott Dierking scored the game's firsttouchdown on a short plunge into theend zone,Duriel Harris caught a 16-yard touchdown pass from rookiequarterbackDavid Woodley. The first quarter ended with the Dolphins up 10–7.[6]
Dierking went in from just outside theend zone once again three seconds beforehalftime to put the Jets ahead for good.[1] The Jets were weaker offensively the whole game, gaining fewer yards overall andturning over the ball five times. However, it was one of the two Dolphin turnovers that ultimately made the difference in the third quarter, when rookiesafetyDarrol Ray[7] went 71 yards for a score afterintercepting a Woodley pass, his first career interception return for a score. Woodley brought his team to within four with a one-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter; Jets kickerPat Leahy completed the scoring with a 35-yard field goal. The season ended for both teams with the Jets victorious, 24–17, leaving the Dolphins with a .500 finish.[6]
The win cost the Jets the second overall pick in the 1981 NFL draft (they would have clinched that spot by losing or tying). The cross-town rivalGiants lost to the eventualSuper Bowl championOakland Raiders the next day, leaving both New York teams and theSeattle Seahawks with 4-12 records. Tiebreakers slotted the Giants second, the Jets third and the Seahawks fourth, with teams rotating those spots through the remaining 11 rounds.[citation needed]
Ohlmeyer and the NBC broadcast crew prepared to compensate for the lack of announcers in several ways. NBC promoted the game by telling viewers they would, in lieu of announcers, have the experience of actually being in the stadium, so the network placed more microphones, and more sensitive microphones, around the field than it otherwise would have. However, the NFL refused to relax one of its restrictions and allow microphones to be placed on the players themselves, which meant that it was impossible for viewers to make out signals called by the quarterbacks.[1]
If on Dec. 20, 1980, a Saturday, you tuned into NBC between 1 P.M. and 4:30 P.M., you witnessed something extraordinary: an end-of-season football game between the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins with no one describing it to you. There was, in fact, no intelligible talking at all, just crowd noise, the stadium public-address system and whatever grunts and pad smashings the field-side microphones could pick up—some three and one half hours of announcerless air, the one and only protracted blank in history's ongoing, chatter-filled recording of broadcast sports.
The network increased its use of on-camera graphics during the game to regularly conveydown and distance, score, and statistical information, to the point that there were more than had ever been used in any previous NFL telecast. The monochromatic yellow line that was superimposed on the field to indicate the distance needed for a first-down was then the most advanced technology available; however, speaking later from a 21st-century perspective, Ohlmeyer said seems like "troglodyte communication". The technology of the time would have allowed for a continuousscore bug and a running clock, both of which would have eliminated the need to constantly provide that information, but it did not occur to the crew to deploy it that way.[1] Conventional wisdom of the time, including at NBC, was that viewers would tune out if they turned to a game with a score bug and found that game was lopsided, and thus even whenFox introduced the score bug in 1994, NBC was hesitant to adopt it.[9]
NBC asked Bob Kaufman, the Orange Bowl'spublic address announcer, to make more frequent announcements of information than usual, and to include more information in those announcements than stadium announcers typically did. Accordingly, he noted aloud during the game that referees were calling for a first-down measurement, and Kaufman gave the length of game time that adrive had taken. Television audiences were able to hear this.[1]
Bryant Gumbel introduced the game prior to thekickoff as "a telecast that figures to be different." He was then shown walking into the stadium to watch the game. At frequent intervals, usually every other commercial break, he addressed the camera and gave the audience the score and brief updates as to what had happened and what was happening at that point. His presence was augmented by excerpts from prerecorded interviews with coaches and players, including the Dolphins'Don Shula andDuriel Harris.[1]
As Ohlmeyer had hoped, the telecast drew higher ratings than it probably otherwise would have. "It was a dog of a game," he recalled to ESPN. "It did much better for us than [it should have]."[1] Writing two days later,Chicago Tribune television columnistDavid Israel agreed: "People talked about a game they would otherwise have ignored."[4] Of the approximately one thousand phone calls to the NBC switchboard, the network reported later, about 60% were supportive of the decision to go without announcers.[1]
Gumbel discounts the importance of that reaction, noting that a thousand callers is not statistically significant when set against the U.S. population of 200 million at that time. "I thought it was more amusing than anything else," he said later. "I viewed it as kind of a stunt with a small 's'."[1]
In retrospect, Ohlmeyer wished he had cut to Gumbel more frequently than he did. Michael Weisman, who co-produced the telecast, also felt the attempt to provide higher quality audio was unsuccessful. "There's all sorts of strange noises going on, buzzing and things that sound like a frying pan."[1] The technical limitations of television broadcasts also, Israel observed, made it hard for viewers to realize that touchdowns had been scored on two short runs andHarris's catch, since officials were not within the frame.[4]
Without announcers, David Israel concluded, "[t]his became a game with no context played by men with no pasts." Viewers had to know the backstory of the game themselves to appreciate the human drama on the field. Israel repeatedMarshall McLuhan's observation that television conditions viewers to respond passively without engaging them, but: "here, out of the blue, it was asking us to participate actively, to provide input so that what was on the screen became more than just moving wallpaper. The viewers who were unable to do that were left watching padded humanoids clanking heads".[4]
To Gumbel, one moment in the game makes this same point. At the end of the first half, the Jets decided to go for a touchdown and the lead they would never surrender instead of a tying field goal that Leahy would most certainly have made. "It lacks a degree of drama," he observes, "unless somebody is there to say, 'All right, here's why we're going to shut up and just watch this. Here's what's at stake.'"[1]
Weisman came to the same conclusion in 2010, saying: "Early on in the game we realized that we could do whatever we wanted [...] We'd sit around in the truck and say, 'Let's play the tape now.' But it would just come out of the blue and didn't make a lot of sense out of context."[1]
While he and his colleagues were relieved the experiment lasted no further than the one game,Dick Enberg says he did learn from the experience: "Consciously, to this day, there are moments in every sport that I do when I kind of throw up my hands as if to say to myself and to my partner, 'Let's not talk. This moment is special, we don't need to talk. Let's let it play.'"[1]
Ohlmeyer says that despite a career in sports broadcasting that has involved threeOlympic Games telecasts, 16Emmy Awards and gotten him into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, the Announcerless Game is the one he will be most remembered for. "All the stuff I've done in my career, and that's what I'm going to be remembered for," he said three decades later. "It serves me right."[1]
No other United States broadcaster has ever purposely replicated the experiment, with football or any of the other major team professional sports; the networks have produced announcerless broadcasts but only as an alternate feed (with the main network always carrying announcers).ESPN has regularly included announcerless broadcasts as part of itsFull Circle and Megacast multi-channel broadcasts, usually onESPN Classic; it has also offered (through its onlineESPN3 feeds)skycam-centered telecasts without announcers and using only ambient audio on college football games. In select versions of theMLB.tv app, a 'ballpark sound' option is available on most games with only natural ballpark audio. In 2013,Fox Sports Detroit Plus offered its viewers a "Natural Sounds atComerica Park" channel in which they could watch occasionalTigersbaseball games with just the ambient sound from games at the team's home stadium, with information about the game coming via increased graphics as it did in the Announcerless Game.[10] It was, however, offered only on a premier channel for those who paid the highest rates;[11] the regular channel included the team's announcing duo ofMario Impemba andRod Allen.[10] TheAlliance of American Football regularly offered live announcerless streams of its games, billed as "AAF Raw."[citation needed]
There has been one other instance in which a major league in North America used announcerless broadcasts. In 2005, when theCanadian Media Guild went onstrike,CBC Television continued to carry itsCanadian Football Leaguebroadcasts announcerless rather than bring in replacements. The strike ran from August 20 to October 4.[12]
In 2022, over four decades after the Announcerless Game, NBC once again experimented with an announcerless game on July 3 in a game between the similarly strugglingKansas City Royals andDetroit Tigers as part of theirMLB Sunday Leadoff package, with similar mixed feedback, but with more positive results.[13] The closest any sport or any other entertainment organization had intentionally gone without announcers before this game was inprofessional wrestling.WWE has on occasions gone without announcers mostly for storyline purposes whether it be the announcers being attacked by wrestlers or (kayfabe) quitting. On one occasion, the September 10, 2012, episode ofWWE Raw, WWE unexpectedly went the last hour of the broadcast without any commentary after color commentatorJerry Lawler suffered a (legitimate)heart attack live on-air, with no commentary the rest of the night except for play-by-play manMichael Cole to provide updates on Lawler before and after each commercial break and at the end ofRaw.[14]
Ira Boudway observed inBloomberg Business:
The problem is that cutting the feed from the booth also means cutting down egos and cutting into advertising reach. If you're not hearingTim McCarver recite the lyrics toMetallica's 'Enter Sandman', then you're not hearingJoe Buck tell youwhich beer brand is bringing you the game ... Going announcerless is akin to skipping commercials, and broadcasters and carriers are going to want to find a way to replace the lost revenue.[11]
