The STUPIDEST BROADCAST IDEA in NFL Radio HISTORY
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- In 1970, the NFL decided that it would be a good idea to create a radio program with Javelin Sports called the Simulated Game of the Week, which would simulate one of the marquee games on the schedule with the help of the IBM 360. The program was such a poorly planned disaster that despite signing a six-year contract, it was cancelled not even one year in. This is the story behind the computerized train-wreck
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They were ahead of their time by a few decades. Today, there are about a thousand UA-camrs who do this with Madden.
This is basically simulation football. It's s a computerized prediction of the game with play-by-play analysis
@@suspence5832 UA-camrs today do the same thing with Madden games.
Very reminiscent of computer text sims, really. Games like Front Office Football, Franchise Hockey Manager, Out of the Park Baseball, Fast Break Pro Basketball, etc.
A precursor to youtubers watching and announcing Madden simulations which is both popular and lucrative for the creators.
This may have been stupid and dumb then, but it was decades too soon for the idea.
It's stupid now. Anyone watching (or playing) Madden in the last decade is an idiot.
I have absolutely no idea how you find these incredible stories. Once again, just a fantastic job explaining a story that 99.99% of people who love the NFL do not remember or know about. Your channel is amazing.
I like how he mixes it up. It’s not always one era. Generally 1970ish to 2000ish. Even if it’s players I know about and never saw play I pretty much never heard of any of this crazy stuff he digs up. It’s a very niche part of NFL history and it needs to be told. This guy could do 4-7 videos a week for 70 years and never run out of content. Hope he’s a Steve Sabol type eventually. That’d be awesome.
Tbh. It wasn’t that bad of an idea. Especially in that time. Heck look at how hard it is to simulate games today. I used to try to predict super bowls. For about a four game stretch I nail the way the game went (not just who won but how the game played out) but scores were obviously off. But one year I nailed it. The packers and steelers. Long story short I predicted how many touchdowns both teams would score. But the thing the trip up my score prediction was the fact that Pittsburgh scored that touchdown in the fourth quarter and went for two. Making the score 31-25 I had 31-24. A computer can’t predict quirks even if it does try to dabble into player psychology. The main problem IMO is it was too ambitious and the rhetoric from them leading into was a bit grandiose. But man that was groundbreaking at the time. People thinking of what we could in the wake of putting two people on the moon.
I mentioned in a previous video that JG9 is a post-modern Ed & Steve Sabol (except that he somehow does all of the work by himself… so that actually makes him even better.)
@@okolo22000 Absolutely!!
@@jpmnky this channel is great. He digs up really good stories and needs to get on SP ESPN, but then again ESPN might ruin them because ESPN is kind of lame.
Crazy how 50 years ago someone thought it was a good idea to do simulation football on radio 📻. Now it could have worked as a middle of the week NFL prediction show, but nobody wants to listen to predictions while the actual game is going on at the same time. And unsurprisingly, it was very inaccurate for '70s technology
I'm glad you brought up Harlan. Now part of me wants Red Zone to show the real game he's covering with CBS split-screening to a simulated game and Harlan describes the simulated game. His partner is confused about which game he's calling. Harlan replies "I'M CALLING BOTH GAMES!!"
Urinating tree starts all his videos with that sound byte.
"I'm calling BOTH games!!!!"
@@teen_laqueefa urinating trees? Huh?
@@bobma6342 A former video game reviewer turned into a sports reviewer.
@@bobma6342 Urinating Tree -- you will love him. Unless you are not a Steelers fan, of course.
@@tgfabthunderbird1 I like the Steelers. I have family in that area. The first professional sporting event I went to was the All-Star Game at Three Rivers Stadium in 1974.
o.k. well, for the time, I can see why this flopped, TOTALLY see why this flopped in 1970..... but don't we do almost EXACTLY the same thing when we see people like players, announcers and personalities playing MADDEN (by EA Sports) on an XBox, Playstation or PC? Now, while it was ahead of it's time, I can see where it flopped.... it's better today ;)
If Kevin Harlan were broadcasting back in 1970, this could have worked. He is by far and away the best broadcaster of football on radio ever. He is funny, and when he gets excited there is nobody like him. And because he has the ability to talk fast clearly he can really paint the picture for you in describing the game.
Regarding the computer simulation, what you could do easily today in 2022 that could not be easily done in 1970. Is run the same simulation thousands of times. To see which outcome would be the most likely. And then write a script for the broadcaster to do the game. And then of course let Kevin Harlan ad lib anything he feels would add to the broadcast.
That might be interesting. A good game to experiment with this would be the Super Bowl. The week before the real game is played. You could call the show alternative universe Super Bowl.
I mean "NFL Next Gen Stats Predicts" could be a better title in my eyes, but point stands.
This was such a ridiculous idea. I could have done better by playing Strat-O--Matic football, it would have been more accurate.
That's more or less what this was, boiled down to its essence. Some local radio stations tried this same thing with baseball in 2020 with the pandemic using Out of the Park Baseball.
Dave Niehaus did this with the Mariners during the '81 strike, only he changed it to the M's winning every game (Lord knows they weren't doing much of it when the real games were happening, one of the last games before the strike was the Lenny Randle ball-blowing incident)
In theory this sounds interesting... maybe if they did every single game and showed off predictions. Sure there will be bad predictions. Everyone has them. Though putting it on at a time when real games were on was a dumb decision. If they did predicted game of the week on Saturday at 10 AM Eastern where it would at least be logical that there is no game on, it may have worked. Who knows...
You could with What If Sports. They provide a play by play with their simulations.
@@Rockhound6165 Thanks much. I will have to take a look.
A couple of years earlier, someone put together a computerized championship fight between Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano.
The computer said Marciano won, but many boxing experts think that if Ali and Marciano had met in the ring when they both in their "prime", Ali would've won.
Seems like the computer spiked it's software every time it was booted up.
They could have done better if the flipped a coin to determine their predictions. Their predictions were worse than if they did nothing but spike the ball into the ground on every play
I remember hearing "what if" baseball match ups of teams from the past on radio and I LOVED THEM!!!
You accompanied this story with lots of footage from the 1970 NFL season featuring fumbles, interceptions, and pick-6ers by quarterbacks whose QB ratings were lower than if they had spiked the ball on every play.
Ultimate Irony: Strat-O-Matic had put out a football simulation game just a few years prior to this that might have been more accurate.
This whole thing reminds me of a TV program that aired on ESPN in the `90's that was called NFL Dream Season (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_Dream_Season). Although NFL Dream Season was much better run then the train-wreck that JG9 has described in this video.
Dream Season was epic!
LOVED Dream Season, and loved learning about these mythical teams from before my time.
And Dream Season worked because it dealt in hypotheticals and what-if match-ups that we could never see otherwise. It's the same reason fantasy draft leagues played on Diamond Mind Baseball or the text simulator of your choice work. They didn't just simulate a game that you could wait a day or two to watch the real thing.
Still a better simulation of football than current Madden games.
Idea for a future video on a similar topic:
Circa 1977 or 1978, in an attempt to compete against CBS's Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder on "NFL Today", NBC decided to use a computer on it's NFL pregame show.
I remember that the computer, nicknamed Statz, was accompanied by a Farrah Fawcett lookalike named Regina Haskell (I think she was a model; I doubt that she had programmed or otherwise used Statz).
Whereas CBS didn't allow Jimmy "The Greek" from predicting actual scores (instead using phrases like "close one" or "prohibitive favorite"), Ms. Haskell gave the computer's predictions for the final scores.
Statz and Ms. Haskell lasted a single season.
Today's computers are far more sophisticated and I could see a scenario, especially with the legalization of sports betting, where "NFL Today" and/or "Fox NFL Sunday" could have a segment featuring computer projections, including final scores, if the games being played that day.
Ah so it was the 70s equivalent of the Jeopardy computer that kept guessing PI
Baseball used to do something similar with reading plays off the ticker in the 1950s. Also, is that Paul Krause intercepting the Chiefs on opening day 1970 around the 5:30 mark? Thanks for the video!
This video was fab. I'd never heard of that cockamamie idea before. It's amazing that this survived multiple levels of greenlighting.
To be fair, predictive algorithms are very hard to create.
Many human experts get things wrong all the time. The most predictable thing about football (and sports in general) is that (allowed to play out without league/ref rigging) it's unpredictable. Predicting the final score is especially hard given the vast number of combinations. Football especially is, IMO, too complex to create computer predictions with any sort of accuracy. You don't know when injuries are going to occur, emotional/mental states, interactions with the press and public, etc. are going to affect the game. There are so many players and so many variables that can't be known beforehand.
If there’s such a thing as “so smart, it’s dumb”, then this is it.
Brilliant concept, but about 30 years too soon.
KFI AM 640! That was my favorite station when I lived in Los Angeles. I never heard of this though.
i remember a few years before the merger and afl nfl teams played in regular season, a radio station had a fake game verses rams & raiders and i remember it as being exciting to listen to, including the novelty of interleagues game. i believe it was broadcast in the morning when there was no football going on & perhaps was broadcast when real season wasn't going on. still fun listening. ps you got great videos.
probably would have worked better on a Tuesday or Wednesday then Friday or Saturday.
The idea was genius, based upon the MILLIONS of people that played APBA, Strat-O-Matic, and other simulated football board games. They also were the original formula for the computer games of today (Madden has regressed from being a decent SIM to a plain video game). People DO play these games and follow them. The problem was execution, timing, and it being 1970. If this was done over three months as a PURE SIM LEAGUE between the Super Bowl and the start of the baseball season, it might have caught on with a slightly larger than niche audience. It being done AT THE SAME time as the regular season without accurate data. That's just dumb. In 1970, the only way anyone would have been able to understand the concept would have had to have played one of the SIM board games.
I would love to hear this
Yeah, the technology wasn't quite there yet. This was a time before video games, before Madden and before fantasy football became so popular. It's why the 1970s were so polarizing technology wise.
Bro, I have been following your stuff for years, BUT...
Your hated for sports simulations puts you at odds with at least several hundred thousand, and, possibly over a million fans in the early 70s. Stat based sports sims were big in that era. APBA had been producing annual game sets for the Big 4 sports since the late 1950s. Sports Illustrated began producing a highly successful line of board games in the late 60s, most of which remained in print into the early 90s. Ethan Allen's All-Star Baseball, with its unique player discs and spinner, was commonplace in the homes of young sports fans as fan back as the 1940s. The point is, in 1970, fans had, if they were lucky, 5 TV channels and the radio, where the All Sports Format was still 25 years away. In that time and place, football fans had nothing between February and July. A statistical simulation, the outcomes unknown to the audience, with a top shelf announcer? I can believe that it was produced and marketed poorly but, AS AN IDEA, it should have worked.
One of those times when the idea is great, but it's so great that it's way too ahead of its time
to be fair, everything back then that had anything to do with computers was interesting, new, exciting, even magical.
Sounded like an awesome idea but I would've listened to real women's golf over a computer generated game every time.
They seriously tried to pitch the idea of football being "easier" to computer-simulate than baseball? Baseball is the EASIEST game to simulate! It's a team sport but with one, zero-sum, objective match-up: the pitcher vs. the batter. A player's statistics are less interdependent on his teammates than in any of the other major team sports. Oh, and I get that this was before Baseball Reference, but the first Baseball Encyclopedia was newly out in 1969--it would verify that Sandy Koufax hit 2 home runs in his career. He was a bad hitter even for a pitcher, but unlikely events happen in baseball all the time. A computer wouldn't simulate Bartolo Colon hitting a home run, or Randy Johnson hitting one. Or Scott Podsednik hitting 2 home runs including a WS walkoff in the 2005 postseason after hitting 0 in the regular season. But it all happened.
I wish Charlie Jones was still broadcasting
And old-school electric football tabletop game would be far more accurate than some computer when it comes to predicting NFL games. 🏈
Harry Weltman was later the Cleveland Cavaliers' general manager from 1982 to 1986. He was hired by Ted Stepien and stayed for the first three years of the Gund brothers ownership to help clean up the catastrophe Stepien had created. Also worked in a similar capacity with the ABA's Spirits of St. Louis in the mid-1970s alongside Bob Costas, Rudy Martzke and team owners Ozzie & Daniel Silna, the two most clever business people in the history of professional sports.
This feature might actually have succeeded if:
1. It had been a fifteen minute feature instead of a full hour show.
2. The computer got data on a timely basis.
3. Instead of recreating one game, this 15 minute program should have had a host run down the computer's predictions on all of the weekend's NFL games with some analysis.
With analytics today maybe you could have something like this work and get fairly accurate predictions.
I guess the equivalent would be someone streaming here and announcing what's happening with Football Mogul 22 in a play by play mode.
To be fair, the data that was available in 1970 wasn't as detailed as what is available to the NFL super fans nowadays. Event now, it's still hard to account for the fact that a game got super foggy during the second half, a nearby thunderstorm shuts down the game for an hour, or high cross winds make passes or field goals impossible for the first half.
Sports predictions are garbage. Football has 22 players on the field on any given play. That's 22 sets of variables. Yes, SETS of variables. And that's only if all players play offense, defense, and special teams. The more positions, the more sets of variables. And that's just from players. That's not counting coaching, playcalling, weather, etc.
Neither human nor computer can accurately predict and account for all the variables. Every time you see predictions it's just a crapshoot. You can say that Team A will beat Team B 99% of the time, but you have no clue whether that other 1% will happen today.
Honestly the actual idea isn't bad but it was just done in a bad way and way ahead of it's time before the technology made sense.
- You wouldn't have had the "people won't know if it's real or not halfway through" issue if it was on TV
- Computers nowadays are way more accurate
- It should've used different announcers so it was obvious just by who was talking that it's not official
Nowadays this can easily be accomplished by broadcasting a Madden match or something but in the 70s over the radio was a crazy idea.
Actually the idea is great
So many people uses it to "predict" the results of some event on every sport
Be it football, races, basketball
Or at least ENTERTAIN the audience
I think somebody could have revived this on TV, since with the medium of TV now we can clearly communicate that “hey, this program is a simulation, this is not an actual football game that is going on right now, please wait for actual football”
This IBM, Computer NFL Game sounds like and interesting idea as now a days with UA-camrs doing Simulations of Madden 2022, or NBA 2K 23. Where people are seeing who would win a game in NBA 2K 23 the 2017 Golden State Warriors or the 1996 Chicago Bulls two of the greatest teams in the NBA or you could have the 2012 NE Patriots vs the 1990 San Francisco 49ers. It is an interesting idea but this would definitely not work on Radio.
Charlie Jones and Kevin Harlan was an excellent comparison for those younger fans. Both fantastic play by play men, not with the top job, but clearly competent.
To be fair, if I had to choose between the 1970 New York Giants, 1970 Chicago Bears and a simulation game, I'd probably choose the simulation.
The whole concept of a computerized game in that era was ridiculous, and I don't know why the NFL agreed to something like this. As for why they would air the computerized game program against a real NFL game, I'm just guessing this is why: KFI Los Angeles was an NBC radio affiliate in 1970, and most NFL rights on the radio were held by CBS or Mutual at the time. I can only assume KFI put the computerized game on to try and draw some audience away from the Bears vs Giants game on the competing network affiliates in Los Angeles (even though KFI was also the flagship station for Dodgers baseball at the time, and the Dodgers were playing at home that day).
That's about like the STRAT-O-MATIC football game back in the day.I used to play it,even though it was card based,I can see what they were trying.
Isn't it funny that, 50 years later, we're watching Madden games on Twitch. Stupidest broadcast, or WAY ahead of their time? :-)
Looking at this debacle and the PSINet/RavensZone fiasco (and others), it's pretty clear why the NFL and other major leagues (as well as college athletics departments) are generally extremely careful about which companies they partner with - not to mention the terms of the agreements they enter into with partners.
I think the competition of the simulated NFL game vs. college football on Saturday is a bit overrated. College football had only one game per week on Saturdays. And I think that was until the late 70s.
Better than today's madden nfl/you tube simulated faked crap. Would have been funny to have an inept senile frank gifford do it. 'touchdown buffalo... I mean cleveland'.
3:00 David Frost and Eric Sevareid in the football broadcast booth? Now THAT sounds like a game I want to watch. (lol jk)
9:20 imagine not knowing that bullshit was fake, but at the same time hearing that your city was destroyed while it's a normal day outside haha
It's like u putting on. a. Madden game letting the computer play and Kevin. Harlan doing the game on the radio.
Why was the NFL having regular season games on Friday and Saturday night?
Charlie Jones was my favorite NFL play-by-play announcer
This is probably where Madden NFL came up with the idea of predicting the winner for the super bowl, but they even do a better job than these guys.
So, it's Madden NFL & Moneyball meets shag carpet, lava lamps, and pet rocks.
"And the winner is...Cincinnati by 200 points!"
This sounds like a show ESPN had in the early 80s, it was a battle of the greatest NFL teams of all time with highlight footage of said teams used. I'm not sure who was determined to be the best team of all time via this computer algorithm
It's funny that this failed to find an audience, but there are tons of simulated games in various sports right here on UA-cam. (I assume they draw views since there are so many of them.)
You or UA-cam or both need to cut back on the ads... Every 60 seconds makes your videos impossible to watch
If they did the predictions say on Thursdays or before any college or high school games then it could work. Otherwise yeah it definitely was a failure.
Maybe UrinatingTree is using this program to make his predictions.
That kind of thing doesn't work for radio. Thank goodness we have video games to do this type of work these days.
You need an editor. Your videos are way too long-winded. Easily could be half as long.
If they’d waited 12 years, it could have worked
I wonder if something like this woud be a success today.
Are there any recordings of these games? I'd be interested in hearing at least some of it.
Sounds as bad as as if they spiked the ball on every single play
I don't believe that Bears-Giants game aired nationally--in fact, due to the unconditional blackout rules of the time, it didn't air in NY either. You could only watch a local Chicago broadcast, called by a young local anchor named Brent Musburger.
What if sports before what if sports
And yet, it doesn't seem that we've learned...every Sunday Morning, there's Cynthia Frelund on NFL Network, giving you the score of some game that will take place later that day, based on her "models"...and the other announcers in the studio take seriously what she says.
An old mentor of mine used to do baseball games in Hawaii using teletype updates and sound effects when the home team was on the mainland. Yep made the whole thing up. Talk about fun!
@Felix Leiter: there was a broadcaster here in the Seattle area named Bob Robertson who did that up until the 1990s... I think he was one of the last, if not the last broadcaster to do re-created road games for Minor League teams.
Sunday
10:00 a.m. PT
1:25 p.m. PT
Now of days, we'd be watching Madden videos on UA-cam.
Not to plug other channels, but there are popular channels based on diecast car racing and marble racing that people like. We know that they're toys, but those are real things happening. Not computerized simulations.
It would be more interesting to see players doing other athletic contests that aren't high contact from time to time. Not something in the middle of the season mind you, but something related to training or maybe an off-season skills competition akin to the obstacle course thing ESPN did years ago.
Sounds like a very primitive version of what Cynthia Frelund does with Game Theory on NFL Network.
I'm still amazed at how good these clips from the 1970s look compared to 1990s potato-cam videos.
In that first clip, who are the Miami Dolphins playing against? The helmets almost look like this is an intrasquad scrimmage.
Looks like the Pats
@@micmac99 Yeah, I think you're right. The blue on Pat Patriot extends from his lowered hand holding the ball up to his raised opposite shoulder in such a manner that if you blur the picture enough, it looks like a jumping fish, with one leg being the tail fin. Also, the red uniforms in that clip look kind of orangey, so knowing that I was looking at the Dolphins, my mind kind of tricked me into thinking the other team looked like the Dolphins as well.
Just what everyone wants computer simulated games
Side note: WKBW in Buffalo did a great version of War of the Worlds.
Jeff Kaye?
I'd rather watch a replay of a classic game than a fake one
16/32 are eastern time
7:04 loves the NFL
I think this could have worked if instead of using real NFL teams and stuff they used fake teams and basically created a whole fake league around it. Could make for some genuinely interesting storytelling.
Don’t they do this with the madden computer game almost every week?
“Who would be interested”
Lots of people lol
This idea would have been great had it been proposed today