Announcerless Game
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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 | ||||||||||||||||||
The Announcerless Game was an American football contest played on December 20, 1980, between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League. As an experiment, the NBC television network broadcast it without assigning any commentators to cover it. The two teams were playing the last game of that season for them as neither had qualified for the playoffs, and since the game was being broadcast nationally NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer decided on the idea to boost what would otherwise have been weak ratings. The Jets won a 24–17 upset victory.
To replace the announcers, the network used more graphics than usual and asked the public address announcer at Miami's Orange Bowl 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 broadcasting any major North American professional team sport has ever tried it again, except through alternate feeds of games offered with announcers.
Don Ohlmeyer, then executive producer of NBC's telecasts of National Football League (NFL) games, began considering doing a telecast without announcers early in the 1980 season. He had several reasons. First, he had long believed that the announcers were overly chatty and did not let the game speak for itself when they needed to. Second, NBC, while it primarily covered the teams of the NFL's American Football Conference (AFC) teams, generally in smaller markets, was earning ratings almost as good as those of rival CBS. A game without announcers might well attract enough viewers to put NBC past CBS.
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