Lundquist, Bradshaw Advance to Postseason

The identity of the National Football League’s conference finalists won’t be known until late Sunday, but one competition in the playoffs is already decided.

Verne Lundquist and Terry Bradshaw will be the CBS commentators at the Minnesota-San Francisco game Saturday, indicating they won the season-long battle among the network’s crews to see which gets a playoff plum.

Pat Summerall and John Madden handle four of the five postseason CBS telecasts, so there is little available for the other regular-season broadcast teams.

Summerall and Madden will be at Giants Stadium Sunday for the Giants-Rams game, then will call the NFC Championship Game and the Super Bowl. CBS’s “NFL Today” crew, headed by Brent Musburger, will cross the country to broadcast at both sites.

NBC, which uses three different broadcast teams in the playoffs, will have Charlie Jones and Merlin Olsen in Cleveland for Saturday’s Bills-Browns game. Jones and Olsen have developed into a comfortable team and, in view of the difficulties Bill Walsh has had in adjusting to a broadcast role, arguably constitute NBC’s top unit.

The Dick Enberg-Walsh pairing has Denver-Pittsburgh Sunday and is already assigned to the AFC Championship Game a week later.

CBS plans to have an emergency generator at Candlestick Park in San Francisco for Saturday’s game just in case there is another earthquake.

An earthquake that measured 7.1 on the Richter scale hit the San Francisco Bay Area Oct. 17, 31 minutes before the scheduled start of Game 3 of the World Series in Candlestick.

“If we lose power, we would have the ability to maintain our signal,” CBS spokesman Tony Fox said.

The Big East has made itself a basketball power by producing champions on the court and carefully structuring its television exposure. The poor teams don’t show up on CBS or ESPN all that often. Regular-season productions are carefully manicured to put the best dunk forward.

Consider Tuesday night’s St. John’s-Connecticut opener. Here were two teams with excellent records and high hopes, but even that wasn’t enough if you listened carefully to the “set up” of the show. Sure, we expected the 11-2 Redmen and the 10-2 Huskies to be presented in the best light. But wasn’t it surprising that we were 10 minutes into the telecast before learning that Connecticut had already played--and lost--a Big East game?

Such is what we’ve come to expect of league broadcasts that make certain conference image is cosmetically correct. Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to listen to John Sanders and Ron Perry sing the praises of both clubs with hardly a word about UConn’s difficult start against Villanova.

Attention to the image is hardly unique to the Big East in an age when college sports polishes the apple non-stop. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

Connecticut may suffer from the league’s high profile simply because the Huskies haven’t been able to establish themselves in the first division of the circuit. As a result they don’t get the call from CBS, and their ESPN appearances are minimal in comparison with Georgetown and Syracuse.

And when a 93-62 defeat can be passed off with the concluding phrase that “UConn will be back” by an analyst like Ron Perry, we might guess that the PR folks are running the show.

ESPN is starting the process of re-organizing its schedules to accomodate conference college basketball this winter and to get ready for Major League Baseball next spring.

Top Rank Boxing will occupy a Sunday night slot during the winter, then jump to Thursday nights April 5 when the baseball season begins.