It was announced on the Mike & Mike radio show this morning that Sunday night’s ACC opener between Virginia Tech and NC State achieved the highest college football viewing ratings in the history of ESPN2, also known as the Vick Network.
Ironically, one of NC State and East Carolina’s football games in Charlotte in the mid 1990s was THE LOWEST rated television game in the history of any of the ESPN networks. (This stat was true as of a couple of years ago, but may not be true now that ESPNU has launched and currently has such a small distribution).
I watched just a little of Sunday’s game on TiVo last night and thought that Carter-Finley and the crowd looked great on the broadcast. I also noticed a few things that I had not seen addressed by the masses on the message boards:
(1) With the construction of Vaughn Towers, the stationary camera angle at mid-field in Carter-Finley has changed. Historically, I thought that our main mid-field camera that televised the action from the old pressbox was too high (at least higher than the average perspective from other stadiums). It seems as though the new camera must be located on the main level in between the lower and upper decks. The television production struggled at times to capture a good angle on the field. Additionally, some field shots were impaired by items on the sidelines such as ESPN’s sideline crane.
(2) Another change from past televised games at Carter-Finley was the sound of the crowd. Historically, ESPN’s cameras/microphones were positioned in a manner that picked up a lot of crowd noise in Carter-Finley. Perhaps this was due to a large amount of background fan noise that seeped intothe announcers microphones because of the location and structure of the old pressbox. Background noise obviously is not as prevalent now that television announcers are sitting four stories away from the upper deck and inside of a newly-constructed, enclosed facility.
I’ve seen some Wolfpackers on the message boards ‘complain’ about the crowd noise on Sunday night. I was at the game and I do not understand that complaint; and neither does NC State’s Offensive Coordinator Marc Trestman who commented on the amount of crowd noise down on the field in his weekly teleconference. I can only presume that these complaints were voiced by people that watched the game on television and didn’t realize that ESPN’s production was not consistent with past games because of Carter-Finley’s upgrades.
Parting Shot
We are now four days removed from Sunday’s game and there have no reports of anything bad happening to the Vick Network’s announcers that called the game on Sunday night.
