Ask a 70’s TV Sports Anchor – Episode 8: The Final Words on the Super Bowl
EDITOR’S NOTE: Boyd Bergquist was the sports director at KETS-TV in East Tree Stump, Nebraska for almost 40 years. Known across the Husker state as the voice of the Boy’s High School Basketball Tournament, Bergquist was a four-time winner of the Marv J. Butz “Golden Cob” Award For Excellence In Nebraska Broadcast Journalism. That background, along with his quick if not cliché-riddled wit and love of single-malt scotch makes Bergquist a perfect fit to be our “Question” guy.
Question #1)
Do you think the result of the Super Bowl was due to good defensive play or bad offense?
~Mike, The Democrat
That depends on which team we are taking about. The Rams defense is for real, and the Patriots rely on whatever scheme Belichick and his assistants can cook up to keep us believing Dont’a Hightower is a legitimate NFL player. Let’s just be honest, Aaron Donald is a man amongst boys, but when your offense can’t stay on the field, even Superman would have had his tongue hanging out in the fourth quarter. The fact that the Patriots only scored 13 points is a testament to the Rams defense, especially when you stop to consider the complete dissolve-job the Ram offense pulled.
Let’s be even more honest. There’s three plays on offense which pretty much gift-wrapped this game for New England. The back-breaker came when quarterback Jared Goff took a big ol’ crap in his helmet, throwing this sorry-ass floater of an interception that a kid in Pop Warner football would have picked. Championship quarterbacks make big plays when the game is on the line; that’s not what Goff did.
That was the only pick Goff threw all game, but that’s only because Dont’a Hightower couldn’t hang on to a ball that hit him right in the hands on the first play of the second half. But to be fair, you can’t drop this all on Jared Goff. Traded to the Rams from New England this past April, wide receiver Brandin “Hands of Stone” Cooks apparently still thinks he’s on the Patriots’ payroll. He flubbed two passed that clearly would have changed the game.
Yeah, I get he’s double-covered, but he’s open, Goff puts the ball in exactly the right place, the ball hits him in the freakin’ hands, and he gags it. That is exactly what NFL wide receivers get paid to do . Cooks does it not just once, but twice on almost exactly identical plays.
In the immortal words of Ron Jaworski, “Shit, son…you gotta catch that ball.” In other words, the Patriots didn’t win because of the play of their defense. They also didn’t win because of Tom Brady as he didn’t play much better than Goff. Brady also threw a pick, which would have been two if Marcus Peters could catch. At the end of the day, the differrence between Brady and Goff was about 40 passing yards.
In other words, the Patriots won because the Rams offense shot itself in the hoof. Case closed.
Question #2)
Did you see the overnight ratings for the Super Bowl? #IToldYouSo
~Critical Mass-Hole
What can I say? When you’re right, you’re right, and Mr. Mass-Hole…you’re were right.
In my last post, Critical Mass-Hole sent me this question:
Some people think the ratings for the college football championship were down because everybody is bored with Alabama and Clemson. Do you think the same might be true of the Super Bowl and the Patriots?
If you aren’t familiar, in the broadcasting world there’s something called the “overnights.” These are the preliminary number to gauge how many households in America were tuned into a particular show. Now, the Super Bowl has always been a leviathan in terms of ratings, but they aren’t trending in the right way for the NFL, the networks, and advertisers. Just look at the numbers for the last five Super Bowls.
- 2015: 49.7 – Patriots-Seahawks, NBC
- 2016: 49.0 – Broncos-Panthers, CBS
- 2017: 48.8 – Patriots-Falcons, Fox
- 2018: 47.4 – Eagles-Patriots, NBC
- 2019: 44.9 – Patriots-Rams, CBS
Those numbers are just the overnights. I’ve seen more in-depth household numbers for Sunday’s game as low as 41.1. If true, those would be the lowest numbers since 2003. But more importantly, without getting into a lot of “inside baseball” on the broadcasting business and what those number actually means, you can’t help bu t notice this is a five-year trend going in the wrong direction, it’s a loss of over ten perfect of the game’s viewership 44.9, those are “train-wreck” numbers. I’m seeing household numbers in the 41 range are beyond disastrous.
Think about it. If you are the people at Fox (who just so happen to have the Super Bowl next year), you’ve got to be shitting bricks over this. If those numbers keep trending as they have, you could see a Super Bowl with a household rating under 40 in the first time I can remember in at least 30 years. Even if I’m wrong on that, don’t forget that networks pay for the rights for these events well in advance. That means if they keep dropping in viewership, eventually somebody is going to have paid more for the broadcasting rights than they bring in in revenue, and believe me, there’s going to be trouble when that happens.
If next year happens to be the year, those executives at Fox are in the soup up to their collar stays…and somebody at the NFL is going down with them.
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A 44.9 goes hand in hand with when you ask the average fan who they want to win the Super Bowl and they respond with the answer “Anyone but the Patriots.”
A 44.9 rating also begs the question… what sort of communist isn’t watching the Super Bowl?
(Speaking of communists, I think you’ll find a certain % of Americans tuning out because of Kap).
Their prerogative… and their loss.
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