Beano Before, But They’ll Beano After

Cranky college football analyst Beano Cook has died of some combination of diabetes, heart disease, other ailments and being 81. Dubbed “the country’s leading authority on college football,” in 1982 by Sports Illustrated, Cook headlined ESPN’s Saturday studio shows for more than 20 decades, managing to be informative and amusing without ever donning a gladiator helmet or gator head. A football fanatic from childhood, as a teen Cook hitchhiked to New York to see the Army-Michigan game and to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy game. He spent a decade as Pitt’s sports publicist where he was the one honest man in the business, who proclaimed “I won’t even lie for Pitt.” He had a brilliant idea of posing Pitt’s star basketball player alongside Jonas Salk, who had developed his polio vaccine at Pitt with the proposed caption: “The world’s two greatest shot makers,” but Salk was better at making medicine than making jokes and refused to go along. One of Cook’s most enduring contributions was during a short stint with CBS where he devised the NFL map that determines what regions see what games on television. At the time network executives simply looked at the standings and picked the teams with the best records, ignoring the schadenfreude for football fans watching their archrivals lose. So Packers fans got to watch the Bears and vice versa. The Redskins were broadcast throughout the South because no one cared about the Falcons. When a team was on the rise, they got more air time, like Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers. For neutral regions, Cook would call local sportswriters or even random fans to get an idea on what games to program. And when all else failed, they went with the Cowboys, making CBS’ two biggest stars Larry Hagman and Tom Landry. The strategy worked as CBS’s NFL ratings, and the resultant ad dollars, exploded.