Howard Herman: The NBC guys' opinions at the end of the NFL season
In preparing for my role in this weekend's Super Bowl special section, I get the opportunity to interact with the national network producers and broadcasters. It's usually done via conference call, but I'll get the chance to speak with the guys from Fox, CBS and NBC.
This year it's NBC broadcasting Sunday's Patriots-Giants Super Bowl game. When you spend more than an hour on the phone, you don't get to write everything you hear into a story. That's why in this post, I'm giving you some transcriptions of questions and answers among NBC broadcast personnel.
Tony Dungy and Rodney Harrison, part of NBC's Football Night in America crew, were asked about the Boston-New York rivalry.
Tony Dungy: I grew up in Detroit and watched the Knicks and the Celtics, the Yankees and the Red Sox and you just had this rivalry for as long as I could remember. You've had great players, great coaches, great managers. It is polarizing, but there have been some tremendous athletes and coaches in both of these cities.
Rodney Harrison: From an historical standpoint, I don't really know the history between New York and Boston. I knew that once I came to this team in New England, they basically told me the first week I was there if you're going to hate anybody, hate the New York Jets -- hate any New York team. That first week of being there, you fell into that whole mindset that anything in New York you hate.
Dungy and Harrison were also asked about that gawd-awful Pro Bowl game that was played on Jan. 29 in Hawaii. It was bad even by Pro Bowl standards.
Harrison: I watched the Pro Bowl and I was very disappointed in the players. You understand from a player's standpoint, you figure out that I made it through the season and maybe they don't want to get injured. If you don't want to play -- I played in a couple of Pro Bowls -- if you don't want to play and if you don't want to give 100 percent, you should sit on the sidelines and allow someone else to get that opportunity. I was actually embarrassed by some of the players. When I played in the Pro Bowl, we played hard.
Dungy: I've coached in it several times as an assistant and as a head coach, and I can remember the first one I coached in 1984, we had Kenny Easley and Howie Long and there were no free passes in that game. The defense came to play. The offensive guys knew it. It was like a regular game. I coached again in 1999 and Randy Moss, I think it was his second Pro Bowl and he wanted to show the world he was the best player in football. You just had that competitiveness. I didn't see that the other night.
Al Michaels has done six Super Bowls for ABC and now two for NBC. He was asked about what many fans see as a key matchup, the one between Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the Giants' Eli Manning.
Michaels: The matchup is tremendous. If you're going to put a couple of guys' names up in lights on the marquee, obviously, it's going to be Eli and Tom Brady. It's the first time in history that two guys that have won Super Bowl MVPs are going to face off against each other, that's never been done in the past. Brady is one of the greatest of all time. No matter what happens on Sunday, if you're having a conversation about the greatest quarterbacks of all time, Tom is very much in that conversation. Eli, on the other hand, is emerging now and becoming a major star -- always playing in the shadow of his brother. Now, with the opportunity in the house his brother built, to have one more Lombardi Trophy than his brother has. Eli has also captured the fancy of everybody around the country.
Bob Costas said that, when he hosted his first Super Bowl in 1986, he thought a two-hour pregame show was long. Now, he's hosting the show that starts at noon. He was asked about the importance of the Super Bowl.
Costas: I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but the Super Bowl has long since become an undeclared national holiday. Although most Americans watch football on a fairly regular basis, much moreso than any other sport, there are people who watch the Super Bowl who don't pay all that much attention to the league during the course of the year. You've got all of the avid fans, then you have all the casual fans and it's all built in with a lot of parties. At the center of it is a great game.
Thought you might find this all interesting.