Colorado, Oregon Were The First Football Game Televised By ESPN

BOULDER – It was Chuck Fairbanks first game as coach. It was the first game for new head sports information director Tim Simmons. It was the first game on air for former CU baseball coach and Buff Club director Irv Brown. It was then sophomore SID student assistant David Plati's first game in charge of the football stat crew.

Oh yeah, and by the way, it was the first college football game ever broadcast by ESPN.

The story behind the story of ESPN's visit to Boulder to broadcast the network's first ever college football is that it really wasn't that much of a story at the time. What would 32 years later become conference foes, Oregon defeated Colorado, 33-19, in an ominous start to the Chuck Fairbanks era in Colorado on Sept. 8, 1979. The network made its debut the evening before with George Grande hosting the first SportsCenter.

"There was some excitement, don't get me wrong," Simmons said. "But it wasn't like it is today when ESPN and Gameday comes to town. Compared to that, it's like they snuck into town, did the show and left."

Folsom Field at the time had seen its share of televised games. In fact, the ESPN broadcast for the Buffaloes was the 30th game in its history on regional or national TV, the 15th national broadcast.

Irv Brown, Colorado's baseball coach from 1970-78 was on the call for ESPN on Sept. 8, 1979.

Simmons said it was a much bigger deal when he worked for Colorado State and ABC came in to broadcast a couple of games in 1974 and '75. "At that point, CU had enough games in the stadium, I can't remember having any issues with the broadcast. Irv Brown was an easy hire for them, already being on staff. Jerry Gross was a grizzled veteran, very experienced and easy to work with."

Brown, the baseball coach at Colorado at the time, didn't even know of ESPN when they contacted him to start broadcasting college football games. Not a huge shock given the new sports network debuted on air the day before the game and was based in a small town in Connecticut. He and Gross did about 10 games that first season. He was, however, a broadcast veteran having worked on KHOW radio since the start of that decade.

"I remember the excitement of doing the game," Brown recalls. "They were all tape delayed, we couldn't do them live. I remember talking a lot about it being Chuck Fairbanks first game, about the network and about the young coach at Oregon named Rich Brooks, he was destined to have a lot of success. I remember Oregon won, and for Fairbanks, it just didn't work here."

Rich Brooks coached the Ducks from 1977-94 before becoming the head coach of the St. Louis Rams. He was then the defensive coordinator for former Broncos coach Dan Reeves from 1997-2000 and finished his coaching career as the head coach at Kentucky from 2003-09.

Brown remembers that Brooks tried to lure his son, Greg Brown, away from Dan Hawkins' staff in his defensive backs coach second of three stints at Colorado. The two had worked previously on Reeves staff in Atlanta, overlapping one season in 2000.

Both Simmons and Plati, who was named SID in 1984 and remains in that position today, remember worrying more about other things rather than the first broadcast of an experimental cable television station, one that would eventually turn into a global conglomerate being broadcast in over 200 countries with eight stations in the United States in almost 100 million homes some 35 years later.

"There was more ado about Fairbanks first game," Simmons said. "I remember Dan Creedon (sports editor at the Daily Camera) getting mad that he didn't have enough press passes and worrying about that more than the broadcast."

ESPN and Colorado have deep ties including GameDay host Chris Fowler (below) a CU alum and former CU Sports Information student assistant.

Said Plati, "I have barely any recollection of it at all – that was my first game running the stat crew and I was pretty nervous about it. I was on it the year before, but Tim put me in charge of it that season. But I'm sure at the end of the game my hands were covered in that blue ink you'd get on you from the stencils that ran on the ditto machine."

In the official file in CU's records, not much was made of the fact that the game was on television, other than a pregame note written by Simmons:

"The contest will be televised by ESPN (The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, Inc.). ESPN is beginning full-time sports programming via cable satellite to cable TV systems throughout the United States. Announcers for the game will be Jerry Gross and Irv Brown."

It was the first of what has been 46 broadcasts for the Buffaloes by ESPN's family of networks. No. 47 will also be a first for the Buffaloes, two days shy of 35 years from their first time appearing on ESPN, the Buffs will play UMass on ESPN3 (Saturday, 1 p.m. MT).

Ties between the Buffs and ESPN run deep, and Brown is hardly the only person with CU ties to broadcast a game for the network. The most notable is ESPN headliner Chris Fowler, who was a student under John Clagett (who replaced Simmons in 1981) and Plati in the sports information office not too long after this first telecast.

Fowler has in fact broadcast two games from Folsom Field for the networks, as a sideline reporter in 1988 for the Oklahoma game and then in 2008 when West Virginia came to Boulder in a Thursday night game that Fowler's crew worked. He has also worked two road games for the Buffs, also Thursday night contests in 2009 at West Virginia and Oklahoma State.

ESPN also broadcast the first-ever Friday night game in Boulder in 2011 when USC came to town, that broadcast was also done in 3D, one of 20 games the networks did in 3D that season.

Other CU graduates have worked for the sports giant, including Monday Night Football producer Jay Rothman, one-time SportsCenter host Kevin Corke and ESPNU studio host Matt Schick.

Colorado University Athletics

Colorado, Oregon Were The First Football Game Televised By ESPN

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