When Half Ends, Squeeze Play Starts

Back in the early days of college football on television, viewers had few choices when play stopped and the band marched onto the field at halftime. You could walk the dog, take a short nap or, heaven forbid, stay tuned in to what sportswriters over the years have dubbed the C&P; of college football. For the uninitiated, that’s color and pageantry.

Watching at home these days, you’re lucky to get the last few bars of the fight song before play resumes in the third quarter. Instead, we spend our halftimes in the studio, watching highly paid announcers on high-tech sets reading scores from scripts. And we watch even higher-paid studio analysts telling us what it all means, usually in brilliant bursts of analysis that take about 18 seconds. Heaven forbid they should run out of airtime before we get Ouachita State-Arkadelphia Tech early in the first quarter.

“Our main focus is scores, scores and more scores,” said Mo Davenport, who produces some of the best college halftime shows on television at ESPN. “A good halftime show should be measured on the amount of information, scores, highlights and analysis. You try and give the viewer as much as possible in a very limited amount of time.”

Back in the early days, studio-show researchers got their information by simply calling stadium press boxes around the country. Now, in the computer age, up-to-date data is easy to obtain. But getting the videotape for all those highlights is another matter.

“A few weeks ago when Northwestern upset Illinois, we had an associate producer specifically assigned to get that highlight, and it was not easy,” said Joel Feld, who produces ABC’s halftime shows. “You’ve got to get it from the local station, arrange for the satellite transmission -- a lot of technical things that take time when you don’t really have time.”

There also are elements in halftime shows that are a waste of time. That brings us specifically to the new man at ABC, Bo Schembechler, the former Michigan coach and now president of the Detroit Tigers. Better he should keep his day job, because his weekend work so far has been a major disappointment.

Unlike his lively counterpart at ESPN, former Indiana coach Lee Corso, a loosey-goosey bubbly presence with a definite point of view, Schembechler has mostly been a bland, boring blah.

Two weeks ago, during halftime of the Florida-Auburn game, Schembechler trivialized the controversy involving former Auburn player Eric Ramsey’s allegations of payoffs by alumni and the coaching staff. He said it certainly did look like all those distractions were making it difficult for Coach Pat Dye and his players to concentrate on football. Surely a man who never had any difficulty railing against meddlesome college presidents, snoopy reporters or incompetent game officials could have offered a strong opinion on yet another example of big-time college sports running out of control.

During one halftime show, Schembechler criticized the practice of highly ranked schools scheduling inferior opponents for midseason home-game breathers, saying fans were being ripped off. Unbeknownst to Schembechler, his own staff went back to Michigan’s schedule and found a game matching the Wolverines and mighty Long Beach State a few years ago. No, Bo was forced to admit, refunds were not offered in Ann Arbor.

In truth, it’s not all Schembechler’s fault. Networks keep hiring big-name coaches with little television experience other than their own dreadful in-house shows and expect them to reinvent the wheel. Some of them -- Bill Parcells at NBC, for example--even tell their new employers they’ll have no part in criticizing former colleagues or players. Nice work if you can get it.

“Football coaches are like mafia guys--they’ll never say anything derogatory about one of their own,” said ESPN’s Beano Cook, a glib veteran of 10 years of halftime shows at ABC and ESPN. “Hey, sportswriters don’t say bad things about other sportswriters; why should anyone be surprised about old coaches?”

Feld said Schembechler “has never said to me, ‘I will not talk about this.’ In fact, he’s surprised me with some of the things he’s said. This week, he’s going to talk about how absurd the bowl-selection process is. The last three or four weeks he’s had some very strong opinions, and I think he’s getting more comfortable with it.

“To judge someone based on a few weeks in a season is unfair. It takes time to develop rapport with a co-host, and it takes time to learn how to say something in a short time frame. ... Before he took the job, he called Ara Parseghian. Ara told him to take the job, but that it would be frustrating because you have to say a lot in very little time. ... People have been quick to criticize him. I would stress patience.”