As the Washington football team came out for its first punt of Super Bowl VII, the game’s announcers had important football insight to deliver to their television audience.
“Here’s a special center in now,” Curt Gowdy said as the camera zoomed in on #58. “He only does one thing: snaps the ball back on punts. George Burman.”
No NFL announcer would explain a long snapper in a broadcast in 2020. No college or even high school announcer would either. But on January 14, 1973, the concept remained foreign enough that Gowdy thought to do NBC’s viewers a service.