A dream for armchair quarterbacks turned into a nightmare for the top-ranked semi-pro team in the country on a stormy summer night in 1980 at Franklin County Stadium in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus Metros, ranked number one in the country, hosted the Racine (Wis.) Gladiators on July 12. The Metros were playing their first game of the season while the Gladiators were already 2-0 on the year. The game marked the first time a minor league football game is believed to have been televised and the first time television viewers in the United States were allowed to call the plays for a football team.
The game was televised on the Warner Amex Cable system in Columbus, a partnership between Warner Communications and American Express. The cable company used an interactive technology they developed called QUBE, which had been around for 2-1/2 years. QUBE allowed people watching at home to interact with their television in real time. The QUBE system was a box the size of a small book and had 30 channel options and five response buttons. The box featured 13 buttons that allowed cable subscribers to choose 20 standard or 10 pay-per-view stations. The five response buttons allowed for any sort of interaction the cable company programmed for a particular show.
The Metros organization had agreed to let fans call the offensive and defensive plays for the game against the Gladiators, which was scheduled solely for television. In exchange, the Metros received $2,500 and another $2,500 would go to the winner of the game.
The Metros and QUBE spent the week leading up to the game educating fans on how the system would work. Metros head coach Hal Dyer provided a 15-minute football primer on the QUBE channel at the top of every hour. The July printed program guide for QUBE even featured a Metros player on the cover and had ten pages of diagrammed plays that included detailed explanations.
“All fans since the time of Adam and Eve have wanted to do this,” Allie Sherman, the former New York Giants and Winnipeg Jets head coach who became a consultant for Warner Amex Cable, told Peter King of The Cincinnati Enquirer.
The idea for the game came from Scott Kurnit, the program director for QUBE. The biggest supporter of the project was the Metros owner, Jay Lehr. Lehr told The Financial Post that he was hoping the national recognition the game received would allow him to get additional sponsors for his financially struggling organization.
“We’re banking everything on this game,” he told The Financial Post. “This is not a publicity stunt. Our intention is to make this format permanent. I think it’s going to be damned exciting – the most exciting use of interactive television ever.”
While the potential financial boon of having the game broadcast on television and the attention having fans selecting the plays would receive was worth the risk to Lehr, Gladiators rookie head coach Bob Milkie was glad it wasn’t his team that had to run plays through the viewers at home.
“I wouldn’t want 40,000 to 50,000 people calling our plays,” Milkie told The Journal Times newspaper ten days before the game. “But it should be fun.”
During the game, home viewers were presented with a selection of plays on their television screen that were provided by Dyer. In all, 21 offensive plays and six defensive plays were provided throughout the broadcast. Viewers were provided five choices for each play, depending on field position, down, distance, score, and time. The viewers would push one of the five interaction buttons to indicate their preference.
The system would take about ten seconds to automatically tally the results. The play that received the most votes was then relayed to the Metros coaches and flashed on the television screen. The coaching staff could overrule the viewers, but they overwhelmingly followed the play the viewers selected. Following the game, a QUBE spokesperson said the Metros coaching staff ran the play called by the viewers on 95-percent of the plays. Fans at the stadium were even told which plays the viewers didn’t choose.
The game lasted into Sunday as both teams agreed to waive the delay of game penalty due to the time it could take to have a play chosen by the fans to reach the Metros coaching staff. In addition, a severe thunderstorm rolled through the area before the game even started, causing a 45-minute delay. The storm was so severe that it washed away all of the yard line markings on the artificial turf field. The weather would continue to wreak havoc on the game as lightning knocked out the lights at the stadium causing another 20-minute delay in the first quarter.
The Gladiators ended up winning 10-7 after falling behind early in the first quarter. The Metros scored shortly after the game started following a bad snap on a punt attempt by the Gladiators. Former Ohio State quarterback Cornelius Green, who was playing flanker, took a handoff on a reverse and went into the endzone from six yards out. The Butch Scharf extra point was good and the Metros led 7-0.
Following the lightning delay, Racine struck back. Gladiators quarterback Steve Thompson connected with Greg Varner for an 18-yard touchdown pass and Bob Taylor added the point-after to tie the game. The Metros suffered a bad snap on a punt setting Racine up in excellent field position but the Gladiators 40-yard field goal attempt sailed wide right to keep the score tied. Racine recovered a fumble a short time later at the Columbus 20-yard line and managed to get a 21-yard field goal to take a 10-7 lead into halftime.
The second half was mostly a slippery defensive battle. The Metros marched down the field on the opening drive of the second half but a 40-yard field goal attempt was blocked by Gladiators defensive tackle Ken Hill. Columbus held Racine scoreless on a pair of second half drives to keep the game close.
Along with the estimated 15,000 viewers that played along at home, the game was reported to have had an estimated attendance of 10,000 fans by the local paper. The Journal Times box score refutes that claim as they listed an estimated attendance of 200. It could be that many fans initially showed up but the long rain delay chased them away to watch the game from the comfort of their couches and help call the plays. As part of the agreement, the tape of the game was to be provided to WMVS channel 10 in Milwaukee so they could re-broadcast the game in the Milwaukee-area on Sunday evening. In order to meet the deadline, the tape had to be flown to Milwaukee and hand delivered to WMVS staff.
There are differing opinions on what kind of impact the viewers selecting the plays had on the outcome of the game. Milkie told The Journal Times newspaper in Racine, “I don’t think it (the fans selecting the plays) was to our advantage. Their selection was great.”
Gus Schrader, a columnist for the The Gazette in Cedar Rapids tried to get in touch with Metros quarterback Tommy McLaughlin, a former Iowa Hawkeye quarterback, after the game but was unsuccessful. He was able to get in touch with his former Hawkeye and Metros teammate Jon Lazar, who painted a different picture than Milkie.
“I understand the fans really screwed up things for the Metros,” said Lazar. “The plays they called were mostly bad, and with a little over a minute to play, they finally turned the play-calling over to Tommy Mac. He took them clear down to near the goal but the clock ran out before they could score.”
Lazar’s account doesn’t fully match up with the ending of the game as reported in The Journal Times. According to the paper, the final offensive play for the Metros started at the Racine 40-yard line. With 39 seconds remaining, McLaughlin was picked off at the Racine 12-yard line by defensive back Earl Anderson and the Gladiators took a knee to win the game and the $2,500 winner-take-all prize that came with it.
While fans told local reporters they had a lot of fun, the technology was never used again for football. The QUBE concept would be abandoned by 1985 due to financial woes for Warner Amex Cable and privacy concerns from subscribers but it can hardly be considered a failure. Many people that worked on QUBE went on to have successful careers in media and Internet ventures.
Kurnit founded the website About.com after a stint at Prodigy. Steve Bornstein was responsible for producing Ohio State football programming on QUBE and would later become president of ESPN before becoming president of the NFL Network. Howard Blumenthal, who created the QUBE show How Do You Like Your Eggs?, went on to create Remote Control for MTV and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? for PBS. Jim Jinkins, who played a role on a show on QUBE called Pinwheel, created the Nickelodeon series Doug. Former QUBE producer Steve Wasserman was the executive producer of Beverly Hills 90210. The list could go on of influential people in television and Internet that got their start with QUBE.
QUBE was an innovative technology for its time and maybe too cutting edge. Katherine Rupp, who worked on QUBE, stated in a blog that she thought the public feared the box that sat in their homes.
“The small, networked computer black cable box placed in the home was seen by some as suspicious, a tracking device, a modern-day version of ‘Big Brother,’” Rupp wrote in a blog post in the early-1990’s. At the time, many people feared what the QUBE machine would do with this information, and where all this network technology could eventually lead us as a society.”
The historic game didn’t have the immediate financial affect that Lehr hoped for as the Metros would end up folding after just two more games. The Gladiators continue today as the Racine Raiders and have claimed nine national titles. Now, over 40 years later, this historic game might be seen as a passing of the
torch moment.
