Televising the 1945 Army-Navy Game

The war ended three months before, shortly before the football season began, and the country was starting to return to its civilian footing. Companies that produced armaments were returning to consumer products. Likewise, new products put on the shelf for the duration of the war were back in development. Others thought about how to apply the war's many scientific and technological advances to the civilian market. All these influences mashed together in a story of innovation that helped make football the game it is today.

Football has evolved tremendously in the last sixty-plus years. Much of that evolution is due to television and the money it poured into the game. Only the welcoming of African American players into mainstream football is comparable in influence, and two explain most changes in football since the 1940s.

For television to exert its influence, however, it had to take baby steps, one of which came with the telecast of the 1945 Army-Navy game. Commercial television barely got underway before the war. Boxing was the leading television sport, mainly because it occurred on small rings or stages, easily captured with a single camera. The first televised football game came when a New York City station broadcast the Fordham-Waynesburg game in 1939. A local station in Philadelphia carried Penn's home games from 1940 through the war. Still, like all other broadcasts of the time, it was available only within the broadcast signal of the Philadelphia station.

Before 1945, all television was local because the available technologies could not transfer video and audio signals from one city to the next in real-time. As a result, each televised show, including football games, could only be broadcast by a station near the stadium and was seen only on televisions within the local station's signal range. But that was about to change.

Army’s backfield in 1945: right halfback Thomas “Shorty” McWilliams (#25), quarterback Arnold Tucker (#17), fullback Felix “Doc: Blanchard (#35), and left halfback Glenn Davis (#41) (LIFE magazine)

In mid-November, NBC announced they would televise the Army-Navy game played in Philadelphia on December 1. In the first test of a system to send live programming from one city to the next, the game would be broadcast in Philadelphia as usual and in New York City and Schenectady, both being connected via coaxial cables in recent weeks. WNBT, New York City's station, would accept the signal and beam it from atop the Empire State Building.