CBS’s NFL preshow went through some small changes throughout the ’60s—it expanded to 30 minutes in 1967, and ex-football stars like Frank Gifford and Johnny Lujack were among the decade’s anchors. But in 1975, this coverage went through a significant phase change: CBS introduced the first live pre- and postgame wraparound program, The NFL Today, setting the template for the modern commentary show. CBS’s broadcast drew its energy from the personalities of a core team of hosts: play-by-play announcer Brent Musburger, ex-cornerback Irv Cross (the first Black national TV sports analyst), reporter Phyllis George (among the first women in TV sportscasting), and, by 1976, sports bookie Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder. The preshow program featured game highlights, reported segments, and other sports news from the week; in their regular block of postgame commentary, the first show of its kind, they could react as a panel to game highlights, a far cry from prerecorded conversations or an announcer dryly sharing scores as if from a ticker-tape. George would interview players to try and coax out a more personal take on the season, while Snyder would advise viewers on which teams to bet on. All of this happened live on the set that would, from this point forward, be known as the “CBS Sports Center,” another first for this sort of nomenclature.
By “Waiting All Day…” standards, ’70s football broadcasts look tame. A segment from a 1975 episode of The NFL Today suggests why: they’re focused on perfecting coverage of highlights from the game itself rather than supplementing it with additional material. We watch the stadium crew correspond with the network HQ to create the segment packages for live halftime shows, and the workflow is reminiscent of a frantic Houston in Apollo 13 (1995). Still, there were some striking graphic accents; the theme sequences of the ’60s and ’70s featured evocative silhouette flourishes. For the 1978 Super Bowl, CBS experimented with state-of-the-art in-game visual effects:3 they developed an Action Track, which drew a path of motion onscreen in the football’s wake, and used an Electronic Palette to overlay watercolor-esque illustrations of the players in interstitials.
By the ’80s, highlights were easier for analysts to manipulate, with more slow-motion and integrated text overlays. During the 1982 Super Bowl, John Madden debuted an invention from Len Reiffel: a Telestrator pen to annotate replays for clearer and livelier game commentary. CBS made some first forays into flashier visuals, with mixed results. The 1983 intro to NFL Today was animated in the style of Tron (1982) or early video games, and the music skewed to the tackier edge of the ’80s—keytars and honking brass were in, your dad’s sentimental big-band march was out.