Nbc Aiming Spotlight On Deion

Call it the Deion-cam. It’s one of the little jewels of technology that NBC will use to track one of the NFL’s most bejeweled performers today when it does its 14th Super Bowl.

But while NBC will place an emphasis on Deion Sanders, network executives stress that this is not a game of toys and trinkets to them.

“I’m going to cover the game from the standpoint of basics,” NBC game director John Gonzalez said. “You start with the same basic cameras and the additional facilities will be mostly for isolation.”

In a game of this magnitude, producer John Faratzis said, the cardinal rule is: “You don’t want to miss anything.”

Faratzis said that with the Dallas Cowboys meeting the Pittsburgh Steelers, NBC expects big ratings. The network, which has sold 58 commercial units for a record average of $1.2 million per 30 seconds, expects a rating of about 45, representing about 135 million viewers.

NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol said that with 2-1/2 hours of pregame shows, plus postgame airtime, the network could gross as much as $90 million in commercial revenues, compared with the $75 million that ABC had last year.

The pregame starts at 12:30 p.m., with the game show beginning at 3.

“The Cowboys are a big draw, a nationally recognized team,” Faratzis said. “Even casual fans know Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, Deion Sanders. With San Francisco last year, ABC got a 41.3. The two previous Super Bowls on NBC got 45.1 and 45.5, so we out-rated them with the Cowboys as opposed to the 49ers.”

NBC knows that one of the biggest Cowboy draws is Sanders, so Sanders will be followed from sidelines to huddle, virtually everywhere he goes, by a cameraman.

“When we talked about facilities for coverage of this Super Bowl, we didn’t know who the participants would be,” Faratzis said. “But all along we said we wanted one camera to delegate to whomever the prominent personality would be. There are stars that command that.”

If San Francisco had been in the Super Bowl, NBC might have had a Rice-cam. NBC also considered isolating Pittsburgh’s Kordell Stewart, but he doesn’t play both offense and defense, as Sanders does.

“We just felt that if anything happened to Deion, it would command enough attention that we’d be criticized if we didn’t have it,” Faratzis said.