ABC PUTS NEW MOUTHS WHERE ITS MONEY IS

It’s not true that George Will is replacing Jim McKay on “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” Ted Koppel is first in line for that job.

Besides, Will may prefer to host bowling. On the other hand, you can’t ignore John Forsythe. He’d be a smash working the Kentucky Derby. That would open up boxing for Joan Collins.

Anything is possible these days at ABC Sports. Howard Cosell got out just in time.

According to some reports, the sports division lost up to $50 million last year after a hugely profitable 1984. Most of that loss is attributable to NFL football, a condition that new ABC owner Capital Cities Communications obviously found intolerable.

So, Roone Arledge was out at ABC Sports, Dennis Swanson was in, followed by the recent announcement of yet another shake-up on “Monday Night Football.”

Joe Namath and O. J. Simpson are out as analysts. Their replacement is Frank Gifford, who will be replaced as play-by-play man by Al Michaels. Meanwhile, Simpson has been offered the top analyst job on ABC’s college football telecasts, replacing the deposed Frank Broyles.

The Monday-night move reaffirms the importance of the game over the personalities. With Simpson and the first-year Namath as broadcast partners, “Monday Night Football” rallied in 1985, boosting its ratings by 16% over 1984, when it suffered through a miserable slate of games.

Cap Cities and Swanson obviously felt 1985’s better ratings were due less to Namath and Simpson than to 1985’s better games. That made the two expendable. Besides, those better ratings did not stop “Monday Night Football” from losing money in 1985.

Because of TV’s glut of sports and changed viewer habits, sports has become a harder sell, leading to softer advertising rates, making it increasingly hard to amortize huge rights agreements such as the one ABC has with the NFL.

And Swanson has not ruled out the possibility that “Monday Night Football,” a fixture since 1970, may even be canceled after next season by third-place ABC, to be replaced by more profitable programming.

On an artistic level, it’s hard to fault the Monday broadcast lineup changes. The hard-working Namath improved dramatically during the season, and Simpson was pleasant as always. But as a team, they were sort of a dud. Along with Gifford, they were too many voices with too little to say in too small a booth, failing to approach the electricity of Don Meredith and Cosell in the 1970s. They were a triple-decker sandwich with nothing between the bread slices.

Gifford was all right, but in Michaels, “Monday Night Football” is getting one of TV’s very best all-purpose sportscasters--precise, fast, witty and enthusiastic. If nothing else, with Michaels you won’t get Monday Night Foot-in-the-mouth Ball.

What’s hard to understand is this talk about Gifford being demoted. Did anyone consider him the star of the show over Cosell or Meredith? On “Monday Night Football,” the highest profiles have always gone to the analysts, not the play-by-play man.

There’s recent precedent for what ABC is doing on Monday nights. It happened on NBC’s baseball telecasts, where Tony Kubek was bounced as No. 1 analyst, to be replaced by No. 1 play-by-play man Joe Garagiola, who was replaced by Vin Scully. The Scully/Garagiola tandem has worked well.

But Simpson over Broyles?

Has anyone at Cap Cities ever listened to Broyles as the partner of Keith Jackson on Saturday telecasts? Obviously not, for the University of Arkansas athletic director is simply the best college football analyst on TV. Simpson may know football, but Broyles knows college football, and his work over the years has been superb. Broyles could not turn a bad game into a good game, but he could make a good game even better.

And meanwhile, where else on TV--which homogenizes everything it touches--can you hear a wonderful Southern drawl like that of Broyles?

The wider question concerns the fate of all of TV sports and whether generally diminished ratings and softer advertising rates will lead to less rather than more.

Traditionally, networks had to pay enormous salaries to sportscasters in hopes of attracting the ratings to be able to afford to pay the enormous rights fees required by sports if teams were to continue to pay enormous salaries to athletes. Somewhere, though, the system broke down, and the TV sports pot of gold became smaller.

Combine this economic environment with the fiscal Scroogery and tradition-smashing of ABC’s new owners, and you have a new sports outlook that could spread across the TV board.

And if not George Will for Jim McKay, maybe Sam Donaldson or Emmanuel Lewis.