While the result on the field wasn’t enough to earn a passing grade, the end product that went out over the airwaves was.

In spite of a rushed effort and a production team which was thrown together just a few days before the actual telecast, Bangor television station WABI’s live broadcast of Saturday’s University of Maine-Northern Iowa NCAA Division I-AA football playoff game was a grade-A effort.

Channel 5’s telecast of the game, a 56-28 win for Northern Iowa, was the result of a 36-hour, whirlwind effort that resulted in a broadcast of the game on three Maine TV stations: WABI, Presque Isle’s WAGM (Ch. 8) and Portland’s WMTW (Ch. 8).

Sure, there were some obvious miscues and areas that could have used more polish, but considering the broadcast duo in the booth had hardly ever worked together before – most of play-by-play man Jon Small’s broadcast experience is in basketball and color analyst Walt Abbott, a former UMaine athletic director and football coach, usually works with George Hale on WABI’s football broadcasts – and all three WABI broadcasters (Small, Abbott, and sideline reporter Tim Throckmorton) were working with a totally unfamiliar crew in unfamiliar surroundings, it was a solid performance.

First, since there were many more of these to choose from, the high points first:

Play it again Sam: Instant replays weren’t always instant, but they were well done and not overused to the point of sacrificing live game action for replays.

Nostradamus knows: Abbott did a solid job anticipating plays and correctly forecasting the on-field action. His best moment came with 4:33 left in the third quarter as he correctly anticipated a Black Bear quarterback rollout and pass to the tight end for a successful fourth-down conversion.

Graphic displays: The graphics accompanying the team starting lineups and individual players were well-produced and informative. They included full-color renderings of team logos plus players’ names, positions, heights, weights, class, and hometowns. The cursive writing used for “height, weight,” etc., was hard to read, however. The only black mark in this department came from not putting up a line showing down and distance often enough during the course of the game.

Q and A: Throckmorton asked good questions in his short halftime interview with UMaine’s Jack Cosgrove as he asked the Black Bears coach about whether he was passing more than he’d like in the first half and whether that would continue in the second.

It doesn’t get much more colorful than that: Abbott delivered the quote of the broadcast when he referred to a player as being “tougher than a boiled owl.” Small could only marvel, saying, “A boiled owl, huh?” Abbott simply responded, “That’s tough.”

Smile for the camera: Game action was generally captured well in the frame of the camera, but there were several instances where a camera was trained on the quarterback, but the screen pass wasn’t followed to its intended target. The camera lingered too long on the QB while viewers craned their necks in vain.

The potential for disaster was great considering how quickly this whole broadcast was put together, planned, and executed with outside help, but the telecast was anything but. In short, this was one (or two, or three) of WABI’s finest overall hours.

Pirates shanghai some TV time

The Portland Pirates will make four television appearances in the coming weeks as Portland TV station WMTW (Ch. 8) plans to air four home games live, starting Jan. 4 (vs. Worcester at 7:30 p.m.). The other broadcasts are slated for Jan. 19 (vs. Cleveland, 7:30 p.m.), March 9 (Providence, 2 p.m.), and March 30 (St. John’s, 7:30 p.m.).

Andrew Neff’s On the air column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at 990-8205, 1-800-310-8600, or at aneff@bangordailynews.net.