Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993 TAG: 9301090051
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jack Bogaczyk
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
UVA-GA. TECH STILL AN ESPN FAVORITE
ESPN will reveal a portion of its Thursday night College Football Association telecast schedule next week during the NCAA Convention. The ACC game on the prime-time schedule, it has been learned, will be Virginia-Georgia Tech.The UVa-Georgia Tech game will be moved up two days to Sept. 16. It will be the second straight meeting between the teams in Atlanta to be aired by ESPN. The game will be the third Georgia Tech-UVa date on national TV in four years, and the 13th national network or cable date for coach George Welsh's program since 1989.
The impact of a short practice week will be minimized because of the caliber of opposition in home games the previous week for each team. Navy visits UVa and Georgia Tech entertains I-AA member Furman.
\ BOWLED OVER: The ratings for the college bowl telecasts last week should inch the sport another step closer to a national championship playoff. Not only was in-stadium attendance awful at some games, the only bowls with a rise in viewership from a year ago were the Sugar and Citrus on ABC and the Gator on cable's TBS.
The Citrus was up only 3 percent, the Gator 7 percent. The Sugar had an obvious plus, with Alabama and Miami playing for the national title, and had a 69 percent climb to an 18.2 Nielsen. Still, it was the least-watched of title games in the last two decades.
Against the Sugar telecast, NBC's Orange Bowl had a measly 4.0 rating. That replaced Virginia's Sugar Bowl loss to Tennessee two years ago (4.9) as the lowest-rated, prime-time bowl telecast in history. And the Cotton Bowl, which stiffed the coalition's plans and took Notre Dame to play Texas A&M in hopes of enhancing exposure, had a 1 percent drop from last year's Florida State-A&M matchup.
After the Sugar, the Rose's 14.3 rating was best, but off 7 percent from a year ago. Following on New Year's Day, in order, were the Cotton, Fiesta, Citrus, Blockbuster, Orange and Hall of Fame.
\ SONNY, SAM OFF: Today's local broadcast of the Washington-San Francisco game in the NFL playoffs (3:45 p.m. WFIR 960 AM) will have the CBS Radio call by Jack Buck and Hank Stram. WFIR cannot carry the Redskins' network because of the NFL's national radio contract with CBS for the rest of the playoffs.
Only club network stations within 100 miles of the franchise city are permitted to carry the team broadcast. So, the call of Frank Herzog, Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff will be to a limited audience. The Redskins' pregame and postgame shows won't be available to local listeners, either.
\ COMPOUND INTEREST: The greatest comeback in pro football history also was impressive in building an audience. For Buffalo's erasure of Houston's 32-point lead in Sunday's AFC wild-card game, the audience went from a 14.3 Nielsen rating in the first half-hour of the game to 27.0 for the last segment - an 89 percent climb during NBC's telecast. And it wasn't even televised in Buffalo because the Bills didn't sell out Rich Stadium.
\ EARLY GUESS: ESPN's top college football analyst, Mike Gottfried, picked his 1993 top 10 teams during halftime of last weekend's Peach Bowl telecast. The former coach has eight of the final AP top 10 in 1992 back in '93.
Gottfried's picks, in order, were Florida State, Alabama, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Texas A&M, Syracuse, Florida, Michigan, Miami and North Carolina, although the Tar Heels' prospects were diminished this week when star tailback Natrone Means declared for the NFL draft.
\ DEEP ROOTS: After 50 years in broadcasting, Jim Simpson is back where he started as a teen-ager for a few hours today. Simpson, a longtime voice at NBC Sports on NFL and baseball games before moving to ESPN in 1979 as the network's first play-by-play voice, will co-host ESPN's morning block of Saturday outdoors' shows with Tommy Sanders. Their segments were taped recently in Arkansas.
"In the early '40s, I wrote an outdoor column for a weekly newspaper - for free - and I took WINX [Radio, in Washington] a copy, told them I was the youngest member of the Outdoor Writers Association and could get them prominent guests," Simpson said.
Simpson was hired, without pay, to do a weekly program that made its debut on Jan. 10, 1943.
"I lasted about six weeks before it was determined that I was so bad they had to get rid of me," said Simpson, 65. "I was fired."
Now semi-retired, Simpson - who has worked sports events in 49 states (except North Dakota) and 22 countries - calls Ivy League football for SportsChannel America and is the voice of AT&T's NFL commercials. His first sportscasting partner was Red Grange. Besides his five decades of sportscasting, he also was the White House correspondent for WWDC in 1947.
\ FORE! Peter Jacobsen lost his PGA Tour card, but found a new job. Jacobsen has been added to ABC Sports' golf team and will work in the 18th-hole tower with host Brent Musburger, starting at Sunday's Tournament of Champions (3 p.m., WSET Channel 13).
ABC's golf telecasts are becoming as crowded as the 18th-green bleachers at Grand Slam stops.
Besides Musburger and Jacobsen, the network utilizes analysts Steve Melnyk and Rhonda Glenn, on-course commentators Ed Sneed (a Roanoke native), Bob Rosburg, Judy Rankin, Mark Rolfing and Jerry Pate; essayist Jack Whitaker; editorial advisor Frank Hannigan; commentators Jim McKay, Peter Alliss and Roger Twibell; and part-time analyst Jack Nicklaus.
\ NORM! That may sound like a greeting from "Cheers," but it also would be appropriate this afternoon at Cameron Hall on the VMI post. Former North Carolina State and Florida coach Norm Sloan is working in TV now, as a game analyst on the Southern Conference basketball package on cable's SportSouth. He will work the Keydets' game against Western Carolina for the Turner Broadcasting-owned regional network that is available in six states south of Virginia.