The chairman of CBS Sports, Sean McManus, talks to the LA Times‘ Joe Flint about the Super Bowl blackout.
McManus says that, were they to do everything over again, he would have pushed to have someone from the NFL appear on camera, even if they didn’t have any answers.
CBS was criticized for how it handled the blackout, specifically for not having any reaction from the NFL, the teams or fans, or for providing information on what caused the blackout.
“It was a surreal situation,” McManus said in an interview Monday. Since he was in a production truck, McManus initially wasn’t sure whether only CBS had lost power or if something bigger had happened. “We lost all communication to announcers and had to call (play-by-play announcer) Jim Nantz on his cellphone.”
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“If this had been in the CBS compound that would have been a bigger problem,” he said in an understatement.