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Gaudelli (r) Leading Production Of NBC's "Sunday Night Football" |
Fred Gaudelli has been presenting football on television since the early ’80s, when he produced USFL games on ESPN. In ’01, he moved from ESPN’s Sunday night telecasts to ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” and with the shifting of the NFL’s TV arrangement this season, he was recruited by Dick Ebersol to oversee production for NBC’s new Sunday night package. As Al Michaels considered overtures from Ebersol to join the new Sunday night team, he said Gaudelli, in addition to booth partner John Madden, was key to his decision to do so. “When Fred Gaudelli was hired ... that was huge,” Michaels said at the time. NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was in
Charlotte recently for the Cowboys-Panthers at Bank of America Stadium. Fresh out of his Sunday morning production meeting, Gaudelli sat down for coffee with SportsBusiness Daily Managing Editor Marcus DiNitto.
Q: What is your best explanation as to why “Sunday Night Football” ratings have steadily declined since the beginning of the season?
Gaudelli: If you look at the history of football ratings, traditionally your first two games of the season, the Thursday night opener and even the Monday night opener, those would be the two highest-rated games until you got to November. November is when baseball is over, there is nothing else competing for people’s times, the weather gets a little nastier; and November is when the games get very meaningful. If you look at what we are going to do tonight with Carolina-Dallas unopposed, next week with New England and Indy, huge game, biggest game in the NFL for about the last three or four years, and Giants-Bears the week after that, I think you will see the ratings start to climb and climb steadily towards the end of the season now.
Normally, if you look at Monday night football, they would always sell the first two games as the highest-rated games of the season. The other significant issue is that one of the weeks we were up against a divisional playoff game with the same team in our market. We had Pittsburgh-San Diego on Sunday night and the game against us was San Diego at St. Louis, so you are splitting the market right there. The following week, we had the Mets-Cardinals game against us, so to me those are all very explainable, but this is following the course of history.
Q: What’s your take on how the new flex schedule will impact ratings?
Gaudelli: I did “Monday Night Football” for the last five years and when you got to this point in the season, you were just saying a lot of prayers that your schedule was going to hold up. Last year, for instance, in November on “Monday Night Football,” we did Colts-Patriots and had the highest-rated Monday night game in five years. Two weeks later, we had Steelers-Colts and we did the highest-rated Monday night game in five years. Then the schedule fell apart; we had teams that did not have winning records. I think the fact that we are going to have meaningful games every single week, to me having been through this the last five years, it is a no-brainer that ratings are going to climb.
Q: Tell us one difference between working for ABC and working for NBC.
Gaudelli: Just the way the company approaches the property. At ABC, even though “Monday Night Football” for many, many years was their only top-ten show, the Disney company really wanted no part of it and did everything they could not to support it. At NBC, they look at it as the cornerstone to their turnaround in primetime television and the entire company supports it and is enthusiastic about it.
Q: We’ve seen your opinion before on it, but again, tell us your feelings toward the disappearance of the ABC Sports brand?
Gaudelli: I think it really depends on how old you are. I happen to be 46 years old. When I grew up and I was a huge sports fan, the ABC Sports brand stood above the rest. I don’t even know why, but that is what I felt. They had the Olympics and guys like Jim McKay, they had “Monday Night Football” with Dandy Don (Meredith) and (Howard) Cosell, just the way they did sports. To me, the ABC Sports brand, from where I grew up, was the sports brand. Now, if you are like 20 years old, you have grown up with ESPN, so that’s what you think is the sports brand. I have tried to say it this way every single time, it’s a generational thing. It would be like if the Yankees changed their name to the iPod Yankees, it is just not the same. On a personal note, I just feel sorry for a lot of my colleagues at ABC, who had to kind of lose their identity.
Q: Some have said that Roone Arledge would understand, that he would never have been able to anticipate the growth of cable and the ESPN brand. Do you buy that?
Gaudelli: I never met Roone, so it would be really hard for me to kind of get into his mind and what he would be thinking. I think a guy like Roone Arledge may have figured out another way where it didn’t have to come to that. I think there is a lot of value in a network sports brand -- obviously, the fact that CBS, Fox and NBC spend all this money. I do think that most of America feels like the network is of higher quality than a cable network, and believe me, I worked at ESPN for 20 years and I know the quality they put out. He was such an innovative guy that maybe he would have come up with a different way, kind of like Dick (Ebersol) has come up with a different way.
Q: The influence of fantasy sports is obviously growing. We are seeing more programming elements directed toward fantasy players. How do you strike a balance between offering the fantasy player what he wants and not detracting too much from the game itself?
Gaudelli: NBCSports.com really caters to the fantasy player and has its own fantasy game you can play along with on “Sunday Night Football.” If you are a fantasy player, you know what your players have done by the time we come on the air at 8:00 on Sunday night. So my philosophy has always been as a fan, forget about the fantasy player, you want to know what the players are doing in the game. You want to know their statistics -- so I’ve always been heavy statistics, individually and obviously if there is a trend with a team I would do that. But I do think it gets a little bit overdone on some of the other networks, because while there is a large segment that plays fantasy, there is another segment ten times that that doesn’t play fantasy. When you have all this information on the screen all over the place, it becomes distracting. I am not sure everybody else has really figured out the balance yet.
Q: What technological tweaks do you have in mind going forward this season for “Sunday Night Football”?
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| Gaudelli (l) And NBC's Drew Esocoff Still Have
Not Used All Available Technology In Broadcasts |
Gaudelli: Technology is a double-edged sword in this regard: it has to be meaningful. There is a lot of technology out there that anyone can put on the air but isn’t meaningful to the outcome of the game or isn’t meaningful to what you are watching in the game. The first-and-ten line was meaningful technology. The constant clock and score is meaningful technology; and those are things that are on the screen all the time that make the game easier to understand and more enjoyable to watch. To me, any technology that we would want to use has to fit those two descriptions -- does it make it more understandable and does it make it more enjoyable?
We have a technology that I had on “Monday Night Football” that we have here that I have not used once yet this year, where you can track how much ground the player covers on a particular play. I had that play on Monday night where Donovan McNabb dropped back, rolled all the way to his right to the sideline, came all the way back to his left and hit Freddie Mitchell 70 yards down the field. That technology on that play was phenomenal, but I haven’t had a play like that this year so we haven’t broken it out yet.
Q: What one piece of advice would you give NFL Network before they start broadcasting regular-season games?
Gaudelli: I am a huge fan of the NFL Network, I am a huge fan of their announcers, I am a huge fan of what they do. I know the producer really well, he used to work with me at ABC Sports, and I know he knows what he is doing. I would just say be true to who they are. They have got Cris Collinsworth, right next to John (Madden), the best analyst in the game. I would just say be true to who they are and do the game. Too many times, for some reason, people feel like the game isn’t enough to present. They want to present something other than the game when you have spent all this money to buy the rights to cover the game, yet you want to show us everything but the game. I would just say that the NFL Network just needs to be true to who they are, and they will do a great job.
Q: Give us a quick review of this year’s presentation of your old show, “Monday Night Football.”
Gaudelli: I am going to speak generally about ESPN here. I just think that ESPN is about excess. If it’s Barry Bonds, it’s Barry Bonds ‘til you can’t stomach Barry Bonds. If it’s Terrell Owens, it’s Terrell Owens ‘til you can’t stomach Terrell Owens. If they are promoting one of their movies, it’s promotion ‘til you can’t take it any more. I think that they have taken some of the things about “Monday Night Football” and done it in excess.
Q: What about Tony Kornheiser?
Gaudelli: I’m really surprised at how little he has to say or how little he adds to the telecast. He asks some very neophyte-ist questions of Joe Theismann that I think my 16-year-old daughter knows the answers to.
Q: I read an opinion recently that CBS has lost something by going away from sideline reporters. The example used was that there was a Texans player injured, and the announcing crew didn’t know who it was. Your thoughts on sideline reporters.
Gaudelli: I would go back to Roone Arledge because he was the first person to use a sideline reporter. Like I said, I never met Roone, so I obviously don’t know him; but having read a lot about him and just watching what he did, my gut feeling is he put somebody down there to add a perspective that people in the booth could not add. For the most part, if you stick to that rule, you will do a service. When we had the Jerry Porter situation a couple weeks ago, Andrea (Kremer) is a true reporter so she was able to get to the bottom of the story, report on it and do all that, so she was certainly valuable to us there. I think if you are doing a big game, not to have one is doing a little bit of a disservice. I don’t know if you need them for every game though.
Q: Besides your own, what sports productions do you really admire?
Gaudelli: “Sunday Night Baseball” on ESPN. I they do a terrific job. I love Jon Miller and Joe Morgan.
Q: Does that go against the grain of most ESPN productions in terms of what you call excess?
Gaudelli: Yes, I think it does, because Miller and Morgan are so dominant and they are so baseball-centric, yet they are able to talk about other things. That show does a great job of really letting them kind of set the pace for the show, and the producer and director do a great job on that show, so it is one of my favorites. So yeah, it goes a little against the grain. But look, I am sure ESPN looks at my show and says, “We do 20 things better than he does,” so that is fine, but it is just not my cup of tea the way they do things.
Q: Other favorites?
Gaudelli: The “NBA on TNT” -- that is one of my all-time faves. I think they do a phenomenal job. I love the studio show, I love Marv Albert and Steve Kerr. I think it is by far the best NBA basketball out there. Oh, and I almost forgot my all-time favorite show -- “Outside the Lines.”
Q: Why Pink?
Gaudelli: Well, I love Hank (Williams Jr.), he is one of my all-time favorite guys. To me, that kicked off a whole generation. But you really want to have somebody that is relevant to younger people, and I think she is also somewhat relevant to people my age because she is a true performer and a real signer. I just didn’t want to go with somebody that was going to be somebody that a middle-aged, Caucasian male would relate to. I wanted to have somebody that would definitely have appeal to young people of all races, and who would be acceptable to people my age and older.
Q: Does it make you cringe when you hear Al Michaels make references to the point spread or the over-under?
Gaudelli: No.
Q: Do you ever hear anything from the NFL about that?
Gaudelli: In my Monday night days I did. They would complain about it. It is not something he does on a consistent basis. And let’s not kid ourselves. It’s a large segment of the audience -- when it is 44-3, and the over/under is 48 -- that are watching the game. I think he is actually trying to service the entire audience.
Q: A few rapid-fire questions to finish things off. The best NFL announcing crew not on NBC?
Gaudelli: (Joe) Buck and (Troy) Aikman.
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| Gaudelli Calls Qwest Field Most
Broadcast-Friendly NFL Venue |
Q: The most broadcast-friendly stadium in the NFL?
Gaudelli: Qwest Field in Seattle.
Q: The least?
Gaudelli: Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, or whatever it is called now.
Q: Your midseason MVP?
Gaudelli: I’m going with the chalk here, but the guy that amazes me every week is Peyton Manning.
Q: The most exciting player to watch in the NFL?
Gaudelli: This is my 17th year doing primetime games, and there were two guys to me that stood out beyond everybody else -- Brett Favre and Barry Sanders. Whenever you did those two games, you got excited because you really knew you could see something that you had never before and normally you did. But the most exciting player in the NFL right now would be Michael Vick or LaDainian Tomlinson.
Q: Whose NFL legacy will be the greatest, Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, Vince Young or maybe a rookie I didn’t mention?
Gaudelli: Matt Leinart.
Q: What four NFL players would make for the most interesting dinner conversation?
Gaudelli: Lawrence Taylor, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Reggie White.
Q: Who is your Super Bowl pick?
Gaudelli: I have no clue. You could take probably eight teams in the league right now and whoever is playing hot at the end of the year, that is the team.
