I don’t know about you, but I have noticed that you barely see Bob Costas during NBC’s primetime coverage. Basically, he serves as a bridge from one sport to another, sitting or standing in that big studio.
Richard Sandomir of the New York Times had the same impression. He went one step further and used a stopwatch to quantify how much viewers see Bob. The answer: Not much.
Sandomir writes:
He has no fixed length of on-screen time. But it turns out he’s not on much. In his first two nights back after sitting out six days with the infection, Costas was a visible presence for a mere 5 minutes 28 seconds on Monday and for 10:17 on Tuesday, nearly half of it an interview with the figure skating analysts Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir.
Costas was surprised by his figure for Monday’s show. “If you told me 15 minutes, I would say that sounds right,” he said.
The on-air totals for Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, who filled in during Costas’s convalescence, were just as modest during the three random nights I measured them, ranging from 3:57 to 8:18. (All these times exclude the minute or two of opening narration to set the stage for the night.)
And then there’s this:
Depending on the sports that fit into the nightly jigsaw puzzle, Costas might disappear from the air for long stretches. On Monday night, at around 9:40 p.m. Eastern, Costas wrapped up bobsledding, and NBC headed to the final ice dancing performances. NBC went without Costas for about 90 minutes as it broadcast a dance and a commercial break, the kiss-and-cry, the next routine and a break, and on and on, until Meryl Davis and Charlie White won the gold medal.
“I don’t mind when I’m not on,” Costas said. “I will do as much or as little as you need me to do. If you need to do five minutes and that gets it done, that’s fine.”
Yet here’s the key point. It doesn’t matter how long Costas is on. He is the face of NBC’s Olympic coverage.
“Bob’s impact on the Olympics is greater than the amount of minutes he’s actually seen,” said Mike Weisman, a former executive producer of NBC Sports and a longtime friend of Costas’s. “And when Bob wasn’t there, it was a major story. How many other broadcasters can you say that about?”