Nbc, Irish Walk A Fine Line

Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz and NBC sideline reporter John Dockery work together under a flag of truce these days.

“Still, sometimes he’ll be preoccupied and suddenly he looks up and sees me coming,” Dockery said. “He doesn’t verbalize it, but I can see it in his eyes: ‘Oh, no, here he comes again.’ “

With NBC holding exclusive rights to all of Notre Dame’s home football games, Holtz and Dockery have seen quite a bit of each other lately. So both of them apparently felt it behooved them to forget a nasty confrontation after a 17-17 tie with Michigan in 1992.

“Things have settled down since then. An equilibrium has been reached,” Dockery said. “We’re fine with each other. We had some conversations about each doing his job and trying to find some mutual respect.”

aturday, NBC has No. 4 Ohio State at No. 5 Notre Dame, probably their biggest Irish football game since No. 1 Florida State visited in 1993.

“If you’re not ready for this one, check your pulse. Chances are, you’re dead,” Dockery said.

NBC paid Notre Dame an estimated $35 million for exclusive rights to all Irish home games for five years, beginning in 1991. Two years ago, they extended the contract through the year 2000 for another $40 million.

“Everything seemed so hazy back then when NBC made that deal with Notre Dame,” Dockery conceded. “There was a lot of innuendo and concern about integrity. We’re in a tricky situation with all these quote-unquote partnerships that exist now.

“How do you handle it if there are problems and you have some tough reporting to do? Does your partner then become disenfranchised, angry and you’re no longer partners? I just don’t view it as a partnership, that’s all, or it becomes a whole big conflict of interest.”

Out takes

After what happened last season, you’ve got to wonder if ABC Sports hired Todd Blackledge just in case. Blackledge, the former Penn State quarterback, joined ABC Sports’ college football halftime as an analyst this season, ending John Saunders’ one-man show.

It was last October, producer Charles Coplin’s pregnant wife was two weeks overdue, and she went into labor on a college football Saturday.

“At the same time my wife’s labor pains were getting worse, John Saunders was getting sicker and sicker from the flu,” Coplin recalled. “I think it was a tripleheader day for us, and during the first game, I warned them I was going to have to leave. John, meanwhile, was getting sicker and he had to leave, too.

“What happened was, Roger Twibell was doing a game at the Meadowlands and Jack Graham was producing the game. We called them over after their game to fill in. My wife had a baby girl named Lucy, John went off and healed up and now Todd can hold the fort if this ever happens again.”

Not only has the show acquired another body, it’s also acquired the “Ledge,” a bit of technology that Blackledge uses for replays, X’s and O’s and as a telestrator.

“I don’t know all the technical ramifications. I just know it looks pretty cool,” Blackledge said. “I can diagram plays with it or telestrate or just use it to refer to footage of a play. It gives us a lot of flexibility.”

An obvious play on Blackledge’s name, it’s really just a piece of high-tech glass onto which ABC can project different images.

“It gets them away from the desk, gives the show a little movement,” Coplin said. “He can use it like a chalkboard, although it looks more like the glass in a submarine control room. We used a tape from the movie ‘Star Wars’ to illustrate how we wanted it to look.”

Now that Norman Chad is a TV personality and not a columnist, I not only can steal his stuff, I’m supposed to steal his stuff. In case you missed it, this is what Chad said on TNT’s “Pro Football Tonight” postgame show Sunday:

“The Jets-Giants game sort of reminded me of one of those 24-hour head colds where you have all this nasal congestion, and your throat is scratchy, and you have a runny nose, and you can’t stop sneezing, and your eyelids feel heavy, and you can’t hold down any food, and you have a night fever and then, two or three weeks later, you finally feel sort of all right. The Jets played so poorly today, even Jimmy Hoffa left the stadium early.”