NBC Ready for Season Two
Charliy Nash
Saturday February 7, 2004
“We make it very, very clear that we want this to work,” Schanzer said. “We`re going to do everything we can to make it work and charge the entire division with doing that.”
Pat Haden, the analyst on NBC’s lead broadcast team, best reflected the excitement for the game.
“I didn`t know what I was getting myself into last year,” he admitted. “For me as a broadcaster, last year was my 22nd year in broadcasting and I had more fun broadcasting the ArenaBowl and the Arena games than any other broadcasting assignment I had.”
Most remarkable to Haden was the access he had to the players.
“The broadcasters were not the enemy,” he explained. “The guys were very, very receptive to telling us about their lives. These people had real lives outside the game. They were school teachers in the off-season. They were interesting people with interesting stories. They played for the joy of the game, the pleasure of the game and it was absolutely fun to watch.”
Besides Haden and his partner Tom Hammond, there will be many new and familiar faces when game coverage begins this weekend.
The TelePrompTer free studio show will return, but not until the third week because of Daytona 500 coverage. Veteran anchor Al Trautwig and studio analyst Glenn Parker will be joined by a rotating line-up of guests. First up in the hot seat will be Tommy Maddox, one of the most successful players to move up from the AFL to the NFL.
Two new members of the NBC broadcast team are familiar names to fans of Arena Football.
Mike Pawlawski will debut as the analyst for the Grand Rapids Rampage at Chicago Rush game. “Paws” led the then Albany Firebirds to victory in the 1999 ArenaBowl before he was injured while playing in the XFL. He has worked as a college football game analyst for Fox Sports Net since 1997.
Few people are as qualified to cover the “War on I-4” as former Nashville Kats coach Pat Sperduto. After playing for the Tampa Bay Storm, he began his coaching career together with his good friend Jay Gruden, now the coach of the Orlando Predators. He has also provided analysis of high school football games on Comcast Sports Southeast.
Sperduto’s broadcast partner will be David Hammond, the son of play-by-play announcer Tom Hammond, while Pawlawski will team with play-by-play announcer Dan Hicks.
Another new face is Bob Papa, who has covered boxing and Olympics for NBC. He will be joined by former AFL head coach Ray Bentley. Rounding out the regional coverage will be the familiar team of Eli Gold and Charles Davis.
Fans of the home teams may recognize additional familiar faces, because NBC is using local reporters on the sidelines this season.
In their first season, NBC’s coverage was groundbreaking. Coordinating Producer Jim Bell was amazed at their ability “to be able to push the envelope as we did, do things with our audio enhancements and really take the viewer and give them the access to listen to a coach and a quarterback on the sideline or listen to a quarterback in a huddle. To hear the celebration of players after a big score really makes the viewing experience very special.”
So what else will they come up with this year? Bell alluded to a “new camera” that will be used throughout the games. That’s all I know. We’ll find out about it on Sunday.
Charliy Nash has covered both incarnations of the Nashville Kats, and now has make the 2 hour drive to Huntsville for an Arena Football fix. He also covers the Tennessee Titans as a blogger for nfl.com and still hopes this will eventually lead to a paying gig.
