CBS Says The 'L' With It, Calls it Super Bowl 50, Plus Other Hits and Misses
—Pasadena, CA.
CBS’s promise to America about its coverage of Super Bowl 50 on Feb. 7 is pretty simple.
More. More! More, doggone it! MORE!
The biggest single-event industry in television history will expand this year to include more runup specials about past commercials, a new runup retrospective on great past halftime shows, more hours of pregame show and more cameras in ever-more exotic places.
“I think the next time a game will be this big,” CBS Sports Entertainment Chairman Sean McManus told TV writers Tuesday, “will be Super Bowl 100.”
He may or may not have been joking.
McManus did seem to confirm there will still be only one football game, though that remains the most incidental part of the Super Bowl package. In a 45-minute session with TV writers, McManus and four key players from the CBS sports team didn’t say a word about, for instance, what teams might be playing.
CBS noted a number of differences between this year’s game coverage and the coverage of the first Super Bowl in 1967, when it was billed only as the championship game between the National Football League and American Football League.
That game, won by the Green Bay Packers over the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, ran on both CBS and NBC. To illustrate its importance at the time, neither network bothered to save the tape of the broadcast.
In fact, no complete tape is known to exist today, though the NFL Network has pieced together clips of the plays and will show them this Friday, Jan. 16, at 8 p.m. [all times cited are ET], under the title The Lost Game.
The Lost Game will include just the plays themselves, without huddles or anything in between. The game action itself adds up to about half an hour, and will be folded into a three-hour special with commentary and features.
In any case, CBS notes that the 1967 game had a 30-minute pregame show. This year it will runs seven and a half hours. In 1967, CBS used two production trucks. This year it will use 12. In 1967, CBS and NBC totaled about 50 million viewers. This year CBS expects more than 110 million.
James Brown from CBS sports called the Super Bowl “the biggest stage in sports,” which is true if one just counts American sports. Soccer’s World Cup finals in 2014 drew somewhere around a billion viewers.
Still, CBS will come close to stopping its own world in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. The network has already been running constant promotions featuring every famous person on CBS – including, for instance, Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory, a show built on characters who don’t do things like watch sports.
On Super Bowl Sunday, CBS will start beating the drums at 11 a.m., with five separate shows before switching to the game at 6:30 p.m.
That includes two NFL Films productions, Before They Were Pros and The Road to the Super Bowl, at 11 a.m. and noon. Phil Simms’ All-Iron Team airs at 1 p.m., followed by The Road to the Super Bowl at 2 p.m. That will include the traditional presidential Super Bowl interview, with Gayle King talking to President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. Pregame festivities wind up with the kickoff show at 6.
Specials the preceding week will include Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials, Feb. 2, 8-10 p.m. That’s hosted by Boomer Esiason and Katharine McPhee (right), and features a top-50 countdown.
For those who can’t get enough of the same ads, Kevin Frazier will host Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials All-Star Countdown Saturday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m.
It will be followed by the annual NFL Honors special at 9 p.m.
On Friday, said McManus, CBS will air a special on greatest Super Bowl halftime shows. Presumably it will not spend most of its time on the Up With People years.
On the technical side, McManus said CBS will showcase two new camera technologies.
The first is Eyevision 360, wherein the camera can sweep around the outside of a play to show it from every viewpoint. Viewers new to Eyevision might want to keep a bottle of motion sickness pills next to the bucket of wings.
The second is the pylon camera, placed under the pylon flag that marks the near corner of the end zone. It gives a unique perspective both on runners diving for the pylon and on line play from set plays near the goal line.
McManus did say that amid all this “more,” there could possibly be just a little less of one thing: replays.
“There is a danger in over-replaying,” he said. “If the play was a one-yard gain, should we replay it over and over? Probably no. Sometimes less is more. . . . You don’t have to replay every single down three or four times.”
Also missing, though this has been known for a while, will be the Super Bowl’s traditional Roman numerals.
Super Bowl L, the Roman numeral for 50, just didn’t have the pop of the Arabic numeral.Tagging it “50” just seemed like, well, more.