The last week of the season gave him the chance, with a contest scheduled for Saturday, when it would be shown nationally, between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins.

That loss had been their fifth straight to their AFC East division rivals; Miami had not beaten the Jets since 1977 despite an otherwise superior record during those seasons.

[3] Coming into the game at 3–12, the Jets, touted by Jimmy the Greek at the beginning of the season as a possible Super Bowl contender, had long abandoned any hopes of the playoffs.

[4] Reaction was mixed, ranging from "good-natured humor to applause to some surprising anger," as Bryant Gumbel would later put it on air shortly before the telecast started.

Woodley brought his team to within four with a one-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter; Jets kicker Pat Leahy completed the scoring with a 35-yard field goal.

However, the NFL refused to relax one of its restrictions and allow microphones to be placed on the players themselves, which meant that it was impossible for viewers to make out signals called by the quarterbacks.

[1] If on Dec. 20, 1980, a Saturday, you tuned into NBC between 1 P.M. and 4:30 P.M., you witnessed something extraordinary: an end-of-season football game between the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins with no one describing it to you.

There was, in fact, no intelligible talking at all, just crowd noise, the stadium public-address system and whatever grunts and pad smashings the field-side microphones could pick up—some three and one half hours of announcerless air, the one and only protracted blank in history's ongoing, chatter-filled recording of broadcast sports.

The network increased its use of on-camera graphics during the game to regularly convey down and distance, score, and statistical information, to the point that there were more than had ever been used in any previous NFL telecast.

The monochromatic yellow line that was superimposed on the field to indicate the distance needed for a first-down was then the most advanced technology available; however, speaking later from a 21st-century perspective, Ohlmeyer said seems like "troglodyte communication".

The technology of the time would have allowed for a continuous score bug and a running clock, both of which would have eliminated the need to constantly provide that information, but it did not occur to the crew to deploy it that way.

His presence was augmented by excerpts from prerecorded interviews with coaches and players, including the Dolphins' Don Shula and Duriel Harris.

"[1] Writing two days later, Chicago Tribune television columnist David Israel agreed: "People talked about a game they would otherwise have ignored.

[1] Gumbel discounts the importance of that reaction, noting that a thousand callers is not statistically significant when set against the U.S. population of 200 million at that time.

"[1] The technical limitations of television broadcasts also, Israel observed, made it hard for viewers to realize that touchdowns had been scored on two short runs and Harris's catch, since officials were not within the frame.

Israel repeated Marshall McLuhan's observation that television conditions viewers to respond passively without engaging them, but: "here, out of the blue, it was asking us to participate actively, to provide input so that what was on the screen became more than just moving wallpaper.

At the end of the first half, the Jets decided to go for a touchdown and the lead they would never surrender instead of a tying field goal that Leahy would most certainly have made.

[9] The Alliance of American Football regularly offered live announcerless streams of its games, billed as "AAF Raw.

On one occasion, the September 10, 2012, episode of WWE Raw, WWE unexpectedly went the last hour of the broadcast without any commentary after color commentator Jerry Lawler suffered a (legitimate) heart attack live on-air, with no commentary the rest of the night except for play-by-play man Michael Cole to provide updates on Lawler before and after each commercial break and at the end of Raw.

Going announcerless is akin to skipping commercials, and broadcasters and carriers are going to want to find a way to replace the lost revenue.