…specifically KGO-TV, in San Francisco?
I think it would have been around 10 am, but I’m simply not sure.
This one’s been bugging me for years, but I’m finally getting around to asking. Can any sports fans help?
WHY has this question kept your interest so long? What is so unique about that date, that time, that station, and sports?
I can check the TV Guide microfilm for you at work tomorrow but it probably won’t be helpful for that specific market. Can’t hurt to look, though - we get police and lawyers calling often enough for alibis that we keep the microfilm.
Googling indicates that there was the Orange Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, and a race on that day
Um, no. College football bowl games are not played in October.
WTF? - The Orange and Cotton Bowls are played sometime around New Years (they are, after all, Bowl games). I suggest that you reset your Google search criteria!
Oops, I don’t watch football. There were games played at the Cotton Bowl Stadium and Orange Bowl Stadium on those days, not Bowl games. The wording on the sites didn’t make that obvious to a non-fan.
Can Ranchoth go to a San Francisco library and look up the local TV Guide? Or would he be better off looking up the TV schedule in the San Francisco Chronicle microfilm?
Anyway, it was a Saturday morning, so I’d say a college football game on the East Coast or Texas. Does ABC change what college games it shows, based on the market?
ETA: I tried to search the SF Chronicle archive online, but it only goes back to 1995. D’oh!
The game in the Orange Bowl was Miami vs Florida State, with Miami winning 34-20. The sorta cite below refers to "the lights coming on, so I think it would be a night game, and not the one the OP wants.
October 8, 1994 was a Saturday, so college football would likely be on televison. 10 AM in San Fransisco might catch a national broadcast of a game in the Eastern or Central time zones, I think.
Baseball playoffs might be a possibility, but probably not at 10 AM on the West Coast.
Think we can rule out baseball. That as the strike year that cancelled the playoffs and the World Series.
The game in the Cotton Bowl looks like it was the Longhorns-Sooners, the annual Red River Rivalry. The game is famous for the “Stone Cold Stop”-at the end of the game, Oklahoma is down by 7, it’s their 4th down, and they’re at Texas’s 1 yard line. Stoney Clark, UT’s defensive lineman stops the drive and Texas wins the game.
The game in the Cotton Bowl (stadium) was Texas vs Oklahoma, with Texas winning 17-10.
That might be a contender. It’s a rivalry game, so it might have been a national broadcast, and if it was a day game, it could fit the 10 AM West Coast viewing
Other possibilities:
Boston College 30 Notre Dame 11
UC Davis 27 Sacramento State 24–kinda doubt they would have played at 10 AM in California, though.
FWIW, I also stumbled on a newspaper archive for an east coast paper that luckily included the TV schedule. It was cartoons until 12, then “College Football” starting at noon on ABC. That would be 9am west coast, and listing “College Football” instead of a particular game may indicate that ABC was showing football nationwide, but different games in different areas.
Yeah, I’m thinking this may be hard to pin down without the TV listings for San Francisco for that date. Fun question, though. I enjoyed reading about the Texas-Oklahoma, Miami-Florida St, and BC-Notre Dame games. The local station probably has records, but I dunno if they’d be willing to dig out the info for the general public…
I see that Georgia Clemson was on ABC on that day, but I don’t know if that was a normal east coast start time or not.
It was Cal.(2-2, 1-0) vs UCLA(2-3, 0-2). Sounds like a boring game.
I accessed the San Francisco Chronicle through ProQuest.
Wow, that’s pretty cool that we got a definitive answer in under eight hours. However, am I the only one who has the sinking feeling we’ll never know why the OP wanted to know?
Clearly, something memorable happened. It must have something to do with either sex or death.
samclem—first off, thank you! But second…did you happen to see what stadium it was being played at?
And thanks to everyone for looking this one up for me!
This is one of those things that’ll bug ya if you don’t find out, isn’t it? 
Well, so no one stews—as Fubaya’s research showed, it would have been cartoons until noon on the east coast until football came on. So it would have come on at 9 on a west coast station.
I don’t think the good cartoons came on until 7 or so, so that was down to two hours. Which didn’t include the 10 am-ish timeslot. Which was where they put “Sonic the Hedgehog”—the well written one, not the syndicated one.
Which was supposed to be running the second part of a two-part episode. Which had ended with a cliffhanger the week before. It only came out on DVD two years ago.
I’ll admit that I looked up the exact date only recently, but I am still a little bitter about it even after all this time. It was the worst saturday morning cartoon preemption I’d seen in my childhood since that time in 1989 when they kept cutting in with news about some kind of demonstration in China. And on the day I’d decided to tape the broadcast, to boot. :eek:
And it looked like it was a boring game that day in 94, too? ::groan::
I seriously doubt that a west coast game (Cal/UCLA) started that early; it must have been one of the other games.