Announcerless game

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. 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's American Football Conference (AFC) teams, it was earning ratings almost as good as those of rival CBS, who at the time was broadcasting games involving teams from the National Football Conference (NFC). A game without announcers might well attract enough viewers to put NBC past CBS. 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 the Miami Orange Bowl, their home stadium at the time, had the better record at 8–7. Las Vegas oddsmakers made 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 their AFC East division rivals; Miami had not beaten the Jets since 1977 despite an otherwise superior record during those seasons. The Dolphins were also bringing a three-game winning streak into the contest; a victory would redeem their failure to reach the playoffs with a winning record for the season. Reaction was mixed, ranging from "good-natured humor to applause to some surprising anger," as Bryant Gumbel would later put it on air shortly before the telecast started. "My first reaction was of incredible nerve, nervousness," Dick Enberg, one of the NBC announcers, recalled to ESPN 30 years later. "We all gathered together, hoping that Ohlmeyer was dead wrong ... What if this crazy idea really worked?" Dolphins' defensive end Bob 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." ==Game==

The game started at 12:30 p.m. The weather was seasonal for Miami, with temperatures around and winds. A total of 41,854 came to see the game at the Miami Orange Bowl, meaning the game was blacked out in south Florida. Dierking went in from just outside the end zone once again three seconds before halftime to put the Jets ahead for good. went 71 yards for a score after intercepting 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 kicker Pat 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. 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 rival Giants lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion Oakland Raiders the next day, leaving both New York teams and the Seattle 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. ==Telecast==

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. NBC asked Bob Kaufman, the Orange Bowl's public 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 a drive had taken. Television audiences were able to hear this. Bryant Gumbel introduced the game prior to the kickoff 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 and Duriel Harris. ==Reaction==

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]." Writing two days later, Chicago Tribune television columnist David Israel agreed: "People talked about a game they would otherwise have ignored." 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. 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'." 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." 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 and Harris's catch, since officials were not within the frame. ==Legacy==

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 repeated Marshall 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". It was, however, offered only on a premier channel for those who paid the highest rates; the regular channel included the team's announcing duo of Mario Impemba and Rod Allen. 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 struggling Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers as part of their MLB Sunday Leadoff package, with similar mixed feedback, but with more positive results. The closest any sport or any other entertainment organization had intentionally gone without announcers before this game was in professional 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 of WWE Raw, WWE unexpectedly went the last hour of the broadcast without any commentary after color commentator Jerry Lawler suffered a (legitimate) heart attack live on-air, with no commentary the rest of the night except for play-by-play man Michael Cole to provide updates on Lawler before and after each commercial break and at the end of Raw. Ira Boudway observed in Bloomberg 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 hearing Tim McCarver recite the lyrics to Metallica's 'Enter Sandman', then you're not hearing Joe Buck tell you which 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. ==See also==