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. Las Vegas oddsmakers made them 6-point favorites. The Dolphins, hosting the Jets at the Miami Orange Bowl, their home stadium at the time, had the better record at 8–7. Īlthough both teams had already been eliminated from the playoffs, they had reasons to win beyond ending their seasons on an upbeat note. The last week of the season gave him the chance, with a contest scheduled for Saturday, when it would be shown nationally, between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins. He confirmed it but said he would only actually do it for a game that had no playoff implications. In October of that year reports began to circulate that Ohlmeyer was considering the idea. A game without announcers might well attract enough viewers to put NBC past CBS. Second, NBC, while it primarily covered the games of the NFL's American Football Conference (AFC) teams, generally in smaller markets, 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). First, he had long believed that the announcers were overly chatty and did not let the game speak for itself when they needed to. professional team sport had ever tried it again, except through alternate feeds of games offered with announcers, until a July 3, 2022, MLB game on Peacock between the Royals and Tigers.ĭon 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. 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. Efforts to use more sensitive microphones and pick up more sound from the field, however, did not succeed. To replace the announcers, the network used more on-screen graphics than usual and asked the public address announcer at Miami's Orange Bowl to impart more information than he typically did. 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. As an experiment, the NBC television network broadcast it without assigning any commentators to cover it. 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.

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