If There Is Gap, Football to Fill It This Weekend

If you’re bleary-eyed from the Olympics and ready for some good ol’ American football, you’ll get plenty of it this weekend.

The big game Saturday is No. 3-ranked Oklahoma against No. 5 USC at the Coliseum at 12:30 p.m. on ABC. Sunday there will be three National Football League telecasts, and Monday on ABC it’s the Raiders at Denver at 5 p.m., PDT.

Los Angeles gets three NFL games Sunday--a rarity--because neither the Rams nor the Raiders are playing at home. The Rams will play the Giants at New York, and since it will be the featured game on CBS, the kickoff will be at 1 p.m., PDT. The announcers will be Pat Summerall and John Madden.

The other NFL games Sunday, both at 10 a.m., PDT, will be Chicago at Green Bay on CBS, with announcers Tim Ryan and Dan Jiggetts, and Pittsburgh at Buffalo on NBC, with fill-in Sam Nover, sports director at the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh, and Reggie Rucker, former Cleveland wide receiver who is a regular NBC commentator.

Jiggetts, in his fourth year as a CBS commentator, is a former Chicago Bears offensive tackle who played college ball at Harvard. He was Harvard’s first black captain and graduated with a degree in government and economics. While at Harvard, he was an outstanding hammer thrower. The Bears made Jiggetts a sixth-round draft choice in 1976.

The CBS college game Saturday at 11:30 a.m., PDT, is No. 4 Auburn playing host to Tennessee, and there’s good news for those who are tired of Brent Musburger.

Musburger will have the day off to take his son back to college at Miami of Ohio, so Verne Lundquist will handle the play-by-play.

Pat Haden, as usual, will be the commentator, but the sideline reporter will be Pat O’Brien instead of John Dockery, who is filling in for Hank Stram on pro football.

Stram, recovering from open-heart surgery, is out of the hospital and expected back in a few weeks.

ESPN offers Michigan State at Florida State Saturday at 1 p.m., with announcers Roger Twibell and Lee Corso, followed at 4 p.m. by Arizona State at Nebraska, with Mike Patrick, Kevin Kiley and Chris Fowler on the sidelines.

Georgia-South Carolina will be on TBS at 9:30 a.m.; Purdue-Notre Dame will be on WGN at 10 a.m., and Ohio University-Nevada Las Vegas will be on Prime Ticket at 7 p.m., with Randy Rosenbloom and David Humm announcing. A tape of the USC-Oklahoma game will be on Prime Ticket Sunday night at 7:30, with Rich Marotta and Mike Garrett announcing.

Oops Department: On ABC’s “College Football Scoreboard” last Saturday, with Michigan leading Miami, 30-22, and more than 5 minutes left, Al Trautwig said: “Now that the top-ranked Hurricanes have lost, keep in mind No. 2 UCLA plays Long Beach State tonight.”

Miami won, 31-30.

Trautwig later said he meant to say, “Now that Miami is losing, keep in mind . . . “

Also, sideline reporter Mike Adamle said that the Hurricanes looked fatigued when they were trailing, 30-14, with about 6 minutes left. But as things turned out, it was the Wolverines who went to sleep.

On CBS, Musburger, who has been criticized before for jumping the gun, said, after the Seminoles had appeared to score a go-ahead touchdown with 1:31 left: “Florida State is going to beat Clemson today.”

But the touchdown was nullified because Florida State had called a timeout it didn’t have. Fortunately for Musburger, Florida State ended up winning on a field goal, 24-21.

On Channel 7’s sports wrap-up show Sunday night, Jim Hill, Trautwig’s former partner on the scoreboard show, had some problems of his own. Hill was talking about the last play of the Ram-Raider game, in which Raider James Lofton caught a deflected pass and almost broke loose to score what would have been the winning touchdown. But what were viewers shown? The next-to-last play, an incomplete pass.

Channel 4’s Bret Lewis, on his Sunday night show, said U.S. boxer Anthony Hembrick was tardy to his match because his coach misread the bus schedule. No, the coach misread the schedule of bouts, and also Hembrick missed a bus because it was overcrowded.

At least, Lewis isn’t in Seoul. It seems silly that Channel 4 sent so many of its news people to Seoul. Doing L.A. news and weather from a foreign country doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Trouble Here? Ahmad Rashad, the host of NBC’s afternoon Olympic coverage, apparently is upset about his diminished role on “NFL Live.”

Rashad told USA Today: “My role has become smaller and smaller as they’ve added people. They might as well call it the ‘Bob Costas Show,’ because he takes up more and more time. He apologizes later, but how many times can you say you’re sorry?”

Ratings Game: NBC says “Monday Night Football” helped cause its Olympic prime-time rating to dip to 16.8 Monday night, and ABC cites the Olympics as the reason this week’s Cleveland Browns-Indianapolis Colts game got only a 12.9 Nielsen.

The 12.9 rating is the second-lowest in the 19-year history of “Monday Night Football.” The lowest, an 8.8, was for a Washington Redskins-New York Giants game in 1986 that went up against the seventh game of the Boston Red Sox-New York Mets World Series.

ABC scheduled its first four “Monday Night Football” telecasts to start at 5 p.m. (PDT) this season to help combat the Olympics. ABC didn’t want to give NBC a 90-minute head start with the Olympics.

After Monday’s Raider-Denver game, ABC will return to 6 p.m. kickoffs. Thank goodness.

TV-Radio Notes

NBC, suddenly without a major league baseball race to cover, will do the best it can Saturday, showing the Boston Red Sox against the New York Yankees at 10:15 a.m., PDT. . . . The playoffs, to be televised by ABC, will begin Oct. 4 with a National League game at the park of the West Division champion, presumably Dodger Stadium, at 5 p.m., PDT. . . . Jerry Quarry will serve as the commentator when Z Channel televises the Frankie Duarte-Miguel Juarez bantamweight fight Tuesday night at 7 at the Country Club in Reseda. Another bout on the card has super-featherweight Jesus Poll facing Allan Makatoki in a 10-rounder. . . . Tom Lasorda will be the guest on Prime Ticket’s “It’s Your Call” Thursday night at 6:30. The show will be televised from Lasorda’s restaurant in South Pasadena. . . . Rafer Johnson is the scheduled guest for Monday night’s “It’s Your Call.” . . . Raider Coach Mike Shanahan will be interviewed in Denver on Sunday’s “NFL Today” show on CBS at 9:30 a.m. . . . FNN/SCORE’s popular “Time Out for Trivia” show, with host Todd Donoho, celebrates its 1,000th show tonight at 8 with a special hourlong edition. . . . Mike Cohen, former head of publicity for NBC Sports who in recent years ran a successful sports communication business in New York, died this week of a heart attack. He was 44.