Today's Tidbit... NCAA Film Services and the March of Technology
Ed Sabol founded Blair Motion Pictures in 1962 and quickly won the bid to film and develop highlights of the 1962 NFL championship game. His work impressed Pete Rozelle, who convinced the league owners to buy Sabol's firm and convert it into what became NFL Films.
When Blair Motion Pictures was born, the less-well-recognized NCAA Films, now NCAA Productions, had been around for at least a decade. Much of the first decade of NCAA Films focused on filming and showing NCAA championships in the dozen or more sports then sponsored by the NCAA. After editing and narrating the films, they were made available for showing by television stations, NCAA member schools, high schools, and civic organizations.
By the early 1960s, NCAA Films also produced instructional and informational films covering officiating best practices, coaching drills, techniques, and their hallmark, The Football Code of Champions, in addition to their weekly and annual highlight films.
The 1963 season highlights were 13.5 minutes long and included slow-motion, diagrams showing player assignments, and sound.
Top coaches chose the highlight plays from the films the NCAA captured during the season, from which they created their weekly highlight show.
The NCAA made its films available for purchase or rent, and the movies were mailed to renters.
At the time, the highlight and instructional films had to be mailed to and from their destinations because the technologies did not exist to record full games on media other than film, and they also lacked the technology to transfer significant amounts of data from one location to another.
Into the 1970s, the NCAA football highlight films televised on Sundays involved sending film crews to eight games each Saturday, flying the game films back to New York for processing, editing, and narrating. Once finished, they reproduced the master film and shipped the copies to television stations around the country for airing on Sunday or subsequent days, all of these steps subject to weather delays. The schedule and logistical considerations also made it impossible to include West Coast night games in the weekly highlights.
The same logistical and technological limitations kept studio halftime shows from providing game highlights until the latter half of the 1980s. Instead, the game announcers cut to the studios for updates on scores around the country before returning to the game site to watch the home team band march around the field.
The same inability to transfer film for television purposes also meant that coaches exchanged game film by mail or had their grad assistants meet halfway between the two schools to exchange film. (One of the two speeding tickets I have on my driving record came from the latter scenario.)
So, anyone who complains nowadays about the inconvenience of games spread across multiple networks and the occasional game on a subscription streaming service should remember that we have never had it so good.
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I crave more backstory about your traffic ticket as a football film mule. Where? When? What game? What were you driving and how fast? Did the school reimburse you for the ticket? Inquiring minds...