Cbs Takes Gamble In Studio
When CBS marches back into college football Sept. 7 in prime time after a six-year hiatus, Jim Nantz, Terry Donahue, Sean McDonough and Mike Mayock will call the games, Pat O’Brien will be host of the studio program and Craig James, after a great run on ESPN’s college football preview show, will be the analyst.
But an intriguing presence in the studio - and perhaps a troubling one - will be Danny Sheridan as the program’s information guru.
Sheridan, who will appear a half-dozen times during the season, is renowned for reporting on Nevada’s betting lines. He writes a newsletter with picks. He just published a book, a guide to winning football pools. He is unapologetic about discussing point spreads, underdogs and favorites, and says critics who place him with the late CBS game-picker Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder are wrong.
“He made bets,” Sheridan said. “I don’t.
“I don’t set odds for the country. I report them. I am not an oddsmaker. An oddsmaker takes bets. I don’t.”
Spreading the point spread, Sheridan insists, is sort of a right-to-know thing.
“The NFL and NCAA hate it, but the point spread is what people want,” he said.
He is blunt about the appeal of gambling. “No way anyone would watch an Arizona-New York Jets game if you didn’t have a bet on it,” he said.
Why did CBS hire him? “Not to pick winners or odds,” insists Rick Gentile, senior vice president of CBS Sports. “We need a guy who’ll tell us what’s happening in college football. He’s the best. Everybody talks to him.”
CBS wants to be noticed. Hiring Sheridan, who spent nine years on CNN’s college football show, and James assures that. Putting Sheridan on the air is a winning situation for both him and the network: whatever he reports will surely be noticed (as will any scent of point-spread chat) while the network exposure will enhance the Alabamian’s myriad sports enterprises.
At CNN, Sheridan picked against the spread for a time, but last year picked only game scores. (CNN replaced Danny Sheridan with Dick Sheridan, the former North Carolina State coach.) He does not expect too many chances to handicap games at CBS, but he said, “If there’s a big game that I think will be an upset and Pat asks me who I think will win, I’ll do it.”
He is certain that what he utters about favorites or underdogs will be interpreted by critics as high signs to gamblers.
“If I say Navy will upset Notre Dame, one guy will say, ‘Aha! He’s tipping off the bettors!”’ he said. “That’s ridiculous. It’s just my analysis.”
Sheridan may wind up a small part of the CBS-ABC football tale. The networks are girding for a regional war. CBS’ Big East and Southeastern Conference games - which ABC had through last season in its College Football Association package - line up against ABC’s Big Ten, Pac-10, Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference games. ABC insists that its conferences provide a wider geographic tableau for viewers than CBS, whose strength is in the East and Southeast.
“It’s a loss to us,” said Bob Goodrich, ABC’s coordinating producer of college football, “because the SEC is a powerful conference. It’s somewhat made up for by still having the SEC championship game and the Sugar Bowl.”
Said Keith Jackson, the bell cow of ABC’s announcing teams: “I’m going to miss going to Knoxville on the third week of September.”
On Sept. 21, the first Saturday in the networks’ head-to-head competition, CBS will have a single national game, the SEC game, Florida against Tennessee, at 12:30 p.m. PDT. ABC will counter with four regional games: Boston College-Michigan, Arizona-Washington, Georgia Tech-North Carolina and Oklahoma-San Diego State.
The next weekend, CBS will show Virginia Tech-Syracuse and Kentucky-Florida; ABC will counter with Colorado-Texas A&M and North Carolina-Florida State, plus other games not yet scheduled. With more conferences to play with, ABC cuts a larger swath of the nation than CBS. ABC expects to outrate CBS in five of the six regions it measures, conceding CBS the Southeast.
“In strict geographic terms, it’s a big challenge for us,” CBS’ Gentile said. “Our expectation is with enough teams with national reputations, like Florida, Alabama, Florida State and Notre Dame, people will watch.”
ABC enters the 1996 season with its announcing crew intact; the main change is the addition of Todd Blackledge to its studio show, beside John Saunders.
But Jackson will only stay aboard through 1998. “I’ll be 70 then,” he said. “I want to get up and then decide what I want to do.”
On other points, Jackson said his fee from a recent beer commercial endowed a graduate scholarship at Washington State University, that Donahue auditioned for ABC before he signed with CBS and that he was offended at the commercialization of last January’s Fiesta Bowl.
“Who needs a giant chip in the middle of the field?” he said. “My hope is the Sugar Bowl, which has the national championship game, won’t have it.”
It is the Nokia Sugar Bowl. On ABC. How about a giant cellular flip phone?