Monday Night Game Still a Special Event After All These Years

As the Raiders began piling up penalties Monday night, the obvious question was: Are they on a record pace?

Steve Hirdt, the executive vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau who also works for ABC, was busy in one of the production trucks at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium trying to find out.

Hirdt, whose lap-top computer is on line to Elias’ extensive data base in New York, found that the record for penalties in a game is 22, set in 1944.

He also searched to see if the Raiders had set a first-quarter record with nine. He couldn’t find penalty records broken down into quarters, but he did learn that the Pittsburgh Steelers, in a game against Cleveland on Sept. 11, had committed nine penalties in the first quarter.

ABC put up a graphic with that information.

Such things are taken for granted on “Monday Night Football,” now in its 25th season and as successful as ever. It ranks seventh among prime-time network shows. This isn’t a half-hour of top ratings for ABC. It’s three hours or more.

Knocking “Monday Night Football” has been fashionable ever since the Howard Cosell days.

The criticisms include:

--The booth is overcrowded with three announcers.

--Dan Dierdorf is too opinionated.

--Frank Gifford is too bland.

Forgotten is that the ABC cameras rarely miss anything, the information is plentiful and often shows up in newspaper game stories the next day, play-by-play man Al Michaels is tremendous, and commentators Gifford and Dierdorf, now in their eighth year together, aren’t all that bad.

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The last time ABC did a Monday night Raider home game was 1983, when the Raiders faced a rookie quarterback named Dan Marino. The NFL doesn’t schedule Monday night games at the Coliseum for a couple of reasons.

One, games there hardly ever sell out, meaning ABC would lose the L.A. market. Two, the Coliseum is often not kind to television. Remember the power outage a couple of weeks ago that took ABC off the air during the USC-Notre Dame game?

ABC hasn’t done a Ram home game since 1991. Why? Check the team’s record.

So it took a jaunt down Interstate 5 to San Diego to get an up-close look at the “Monday Night Football” crew, the same one that will be working the Super Bowl in Miami.

The crew, which had arrived in San Diego on Saturday, was at the stadium all day Monday getting ready for that night’s telecast.

All kinds of graphics were being prepared. Only a few would be used.

One showed that Jerry Ball leads the Raiders in tackling ballcarriers behind the line of scrimmage with 13 such tackles.

“Pass rushers get a lot of credit because their sacks are recorded, but there isn’t a stat for the inside guys who stop the run,” Hirdt said.

Another graphic showed that the Raiders’ Jeff Jaeger is third in field-goal percentage from 50 yards or more among kickers who have tried 10 or more.

Ball didn’t have any tackles behind the line of scrimmage, and Jaeger’s one field-goal try was from 43 yards, so neither of those graphics was used.

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After Monday’s game, the crew was in good spirits. It had been a good telecast and, more important, a good game.

It was only the third exciting Monday night game of the season. The two others were Detroit’s 20-17 overtime victory over Dallas on Sept. 19 and Kansas City’s 31-28 victory over Denver on Oct. 17.

The Raiders and Chargers drew a 17.7 rating, which is higher than the season average of 17.4.

There were a few flaws Monday night, but they were minor.

Gifford, in talking about how Charger General Manager Bobby Beathard had drafted Stan Humphries when he was with the Washington Redskins and later brought him to the Chargers, called Humphries “Bobby.” He did it again a moment later without correcting himself. Such slips don’t count as long as they are corrected.

When Michaels said Tampa Bay, Cincinnati and Houston were the only teams to have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, he immediately corrected that to Washington, Cincinnati and Houston.

Quipped Dierdorf: “That shows you how fast we got a call from (Tampa Bay Coach) Sam Wyche.”

Dierdorf was hot Monday night. When Humphries overthrew Shawn Jefferson in the fourth quarter, Michaels marveled that the ball “was 57 yards in the air.”

Said Dierdorf: “Unfortunately, though, it needed to be 52.”

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The two key members of the ABC production crew are producer Ken Wolfe and director Craig Janoff. Wolfe has been the producer since 1986, when Michaels and Gifford made up the series’ only two-man crew. Janoff came aboard the next year, along with Dierdorf, who came over from CBS.

Michaels, who has been at ABC since 1976, calls Wolfe and Janoff “the best in the business, certainly the best I’ve ever worked with.”

Gifford, who has been on the series since its second season, was asked his opinion.

“Different people think they put their own personal stamp on the telecasts, but what really matters is what takes place down on the field,” he said. “The games are what makes the series so popular.”

One thing that might help, though, would be for ABC to put up the score more often, particularly now that the score-all-the-time graphic on Fox and ESPN is becoming more accepted.

Wolfe said he’s getting somewhat used to that kind of graphic but that ABC isn’t going to use one, even one that is taken down during live action.

“We don’t want to clutter the picture,” he said.

Wolfe figures, with the kind of success “Monday Night Football” is enjoying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

TV-Radio Notes

Here we go again: Los Angeles gets the Rams at Tampa Bay on Channel 11 Sunday but not San Francisco at San Diego because the Raiders are at home. The only afternoon NBC game available here is a dog: Seattle at Houston. . . . NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who was at Monday’s game in San Diego, was asked if most homes would be able some day to get the league’s new Sunday Ticket pay package, which has gone over big. “I really can’t speculate,” he said. “Sales have gone better than expected, but our main concern is putting exciting games on the field, not how we televise them into homes.”

The inaugural Diners Club Matches, being held this weekend at PGA West in La Quinta, figure to become another popular television golf event. The match-play team event, created by Jack Nicklaus and Terry Jastrow, ABC’s senior golf producer who also heads Jack Nicklaus Productions, brings together players from the PGA, the Senior PGA and LPGA tours. ESPN carries today’s round and ABC Saturday’s and Sunday’s. . . . The Heisman Trophy winner will be announced on ESPN Saturday at 4:30 p.m. . . . Oscar De La Hoya’s fight against Johnny Avila at the Grand Olympic on Saturday will be on CBS at noon.

It’s OK for UCLA radio announcer Chris Roberts and Marques Johnson to get excited, but they shouldn’t forget to tell listeners what is going on. A case in point was the Bruins’ thrilling 82-81 victory over Kentucky last Saturday. The listeners didn’t know where J.R. Henderson was when he was fouled by Kentucky’s Walter McCarty before making the winning free throws, or that McCarty had gotten mostly ball in committing the foul.

Channel 9 will carry the Raycom telecast of the Michigan-Duke basketball game Saturday about 8:30 p.m., after the Laker-Utah game. . . . Channel 13 will televise Saturday night’s high school showdown between Bishop Amat and Mater Dei at Anaheim Stadium, with Randy Rosenbloom and Ron Glazer calling the action. Halftime guests will include former Ram Lawrence McCutcheon, now a Ram scout, whose son Daylon is Bishop Amat’s star running back, and former Ram Rod Perry, now the Rams’ cornerback coach, whose son Rod plays for Mater Dei. Also on hand will be Pat Haden, a Bishop Amat alumnus. . . . Both KORG (1190) and KGRB (900) will provide radio coverage of the Bishop Amat-Mater Dei game.

KMPC’s Joe McDonnell, the only holdover from the station’s all-sports format, will leave the station Dec. 24. McDonnell said there aren’t enough opportunities to do sports talk under the new format. . . . For the record: Brian Golden is announcing prep playoff games for Lancaster’s KAVL (610), not Canyon Country’s KBET (1220). The KBET announcers are Al Epstein, Barry McKeever and Mark Ceccanese. . . . The Mexican programming carried by XTRA last Thursday was new President Ernesto Zedillo’s inaugural speech, not simply a news conference.