The closing moments of a tight game always make for riveting TV, and viewers don’t have to worry about whether they’ll see every moment. It was not always so. In fact, it was 46 years ago that a perfect storm of events created a fiasco that changed how television handled sports forever.

November 17, 1968: The New York Jets travel to Oakland to meet the Raiders in one of the pre-merger AFL’s most bitter rivalries. The teams would trade the lead all day, and the high number of pass attempts, touchdowns, injuries, and penalties resulted in a slow-moving fourth quarter that had no chance of ending by 7 p.m. in the East – NBC’s strictly mandated cutoff time, at which point the network would switch to its heavily promoted sweeps event, “Heidi.”

Network execs watching the game at home realized the game would run over and tried to get through to the studio to give orders to stay with the game…but the phones were jammed with curious and annoyed viewers, some of them parents wondering if “Heidi” would start on time, many of them football fans wondering if they would see the whole game. They wouldn’t. By 7 p.m., the network programmer had received no order to the contrary, and had been told earlier in the week that “Heidi” must start on time. (The network had sold all of the movie’s sponsorship time to the Timex watch people, and their contract said the movie couldn’t be delayed for any reason.)

Meanwhile, back in Oakland, the Raiders pulled off a comeback for the ages, scoring two touchdowns in the game’s final minute to wipe out a Jets lead and win 43-32. No one east of the Mississippi saw it, and when NBC flashed the final score on screen in the middle of “Heidi,” viewers were outraged. Art Buchwald joked that men who wouldn’t leave their chairs in an earthquake went to the phone to yell at NBC.

The “Heidi Bowl” was a perfect confluence of events: An exciting game that dragged on longer than normal butting up against a heavily-promoted, exclusively-sponsored movie the network had already locked itself into, with a switchboard meltdown to boot. The Raiders’ unseen comeback was the icing on the cake. It was a disaster at the time, but it inspired NBC to install backup phone lines for network communications, and it changed how TV covers sports. The following month, NBC had scheduled a special showing of “Pinocchio” after a lead-in game. NBC’s newspaper ads assured football fans that the puppet would rather cut off his nose than cut off the end of the game. And when the Raiders and San Diego Chargers ran long in their December 15 game, NBC started “Huckleberry Finn” at 7:08, and delayed the rest of the night’s programming by eight minutes. A network spokesman said he couldn’t remember anything like it.

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