Nantz Leads the Way for CBS' Super Bowl Effort

As it did for the New Orleans Saints offense, it took a while for CBS' telecast of Sunday's Super Bowl to catch fire, but once it did, the network's broadcast was up to the challenge.

With game analyst Phil Simms turning in a fine performance, and good replays, particularly in the decisive fourth quarter, CBS' 17th telecast of a Super Bowl was among its most memorable, even if it started slowly.

Simms, working his sixth Super Bowl, was especially strong, weaving in behind-the-scenes knowledge with solid insight. For instance, his second quarter point that the Indianapolis Colts' defense hadn't seen a solid passing attack in weeks proved particularly prescient in the second half when Drew Brees began to connect with New Orleans receivers on short, quick passes.

Indeed, Simms was spot-on in the fourth, noticing that the Colts' defense, so used to attacking, was forced into reacting because of the short passing game.

Simms said he had been told by the Saints that they would show Peyton Manning a different look in the fourth quarter, and he called on New Orleans not to blitz. That was just before Tracy Porter, who picked off Brett Favre in the NFC Championship Game, intercepted Manning and ran it back for a score with about three minutes to go.

Simms sheepishly admitted that he was wrong on the call, but did so with effective humor. Likewise, the former New York Giants quarterback fessed up that he had been told during a commercial that the officials' ruling that Saints' receiver Lance Moore had juggled a two-point conversion catch on the go-ahead New Orleans touchdown could be overturned.

Simms, who speaks in sentence fragments, can occasionally be maddening to listen to. He was largely on point Sunday night, even when he didn't speak the King's English.

His booth partner, Jim Nantz, was, as he always is, solid, if not spectacular. Nantz, CBS' lead play-by-play man on its three signature sports, NFL football, college basketball and golf, will never dazzle the listener, as, say a Bob Costas, nor will he offend.

But Nantz will, as he was last night, be informational and set the table for his analyst colleague. For instance, when the Saints won the opening coin toss, Nantz piped in that the NFC had won 13 straight and the odds of such were about 8,100 to 1. Nothing great, but something worth knowing.

CBS didn't display any new graphics package, but it smartly borrowed from NBC's style of introducing the players, by having each of them present themselves, albeit in a grouping.

Producer Lance Barrow did a splendid job with replays including on the aforementioned Moore conversion reception. And like New Orleans coach Sean Payton, director Mike Arnold gambled and nearly got burned.

In the attempt to go unconventional, with a camera shot that follows the players on a kickoff, Arnold nearly missed the game's most significant moment, Payton's second half decision to go for an onside kick. The ground level camera caught the flush-left kick almost as an afterthought.

The CBS sales department missed few opportunities to work product placement into the mix, particularly during the four-hour pregame show. If it wasn't Boomer Esiason finishing a segment with a cracker stuffed in his mouth, it was the winner of a job search dot-com contest mixing it up on the network's faux field to diagram a play or pizzas delivered to the pregame show set or golfer Phil Mickelson shilling clubs.

The network's promotional machine was operating at full tilt as well. CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric got a live sit-down with President Barack Obama from the White House during the pregame. With Sean McManus running both the news and sports divisions at CBS and with the nightly news running third to NBC and ABC, it was logical that the network would use the enormous Super Bowl audience to showcase Couric.

But is the Super Bowl pregame show really the appropriate venue to grill this president or any president on health care, unemployment and the like, as Couric did? The anchor was much better used in her brilliant piece.

There were worthwhile segments during the pregame, like Dick Enberg's moving profile of a pair of Arkansas high school football players. James Brown's touching piece on the close emotional ties between the Saints and the city of New Orleans was moving. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis' tribute to the Crescent City was energetic.

But you couldn't help wondering if Bill Cowher's chat with former receiver Plaxico Burress -- whom Cowher coached in Pittsburgh -- might have been better handled by a real reporter like, say, Lesley Visser. Cowher, understandably, felt an emotional tie to Burress that made the piece feel more like a fatherly chat than an interview, and also made for good television, but lousy journalism.

CBS wasted no time getting the controversial Focus on the Family anti-abortion ad featuring University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, on the air. They ran it twice in the first hour of the pregame show, with a variation airing in the first commercial break of the game.

The ads, which never mentioned abortion, were innocuous enough. Pam Tebow held up a picture of Tim and talked about her "miracle baby" in both commercials, then got tackled by her son in the second.

Indeed, if you hadn't read or heard a word about the controversy that swirled around the commercial, you'd likely have noticed nothing out of the ordinary about the spot. That was probably the idea for Focus on the Family, the Tebows, CBS and the NFL.

Unordinary, by the way, describes Bob Schieffer's performance Sunday at the helm of the venerable Face the Nation, relocated this week from its normal Washington haunts to Miami.

Schieffer didn't lay a glove on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, asking him nothing in their roughly 10-minute interview that Goodell wouldn't have expected, up to and including why the league signed off on the Tebow ad.