This is a rather fair question. I happen to live in the Philly area, and get a good mix of the “top” announcers as the Eagles, Giants, Jets and Steelers are usually in a headline matchup. A lot of the time I happen to get the Albert/Moose/Goose pairing, and today I found myself listening quite intently to the announcers. Since I was younger I’ve slowly but surely been able to train myself to mostly ignore sports announcers. It especially helped back in the day when I was watching Islanders games and they would start talking about the Lobster at the Hotel during a 6-1 rout.
While I’ve always liked Tony Siragusa (the goose) as a sideline guy, I think all three guys work together great. The banter makes you feel like a couple of guys at the bar. The fact that both Johnston and Goose have worked in the trenches instead of being QBs means they give you the basics without being a personality. All three do a wonderful job of not putting themselves over while giving you the nitty gritty of whats going on. It’s also great because Moose being an offensive player and Goose being defensive means that they have expertise on both sides of the line.
When the games do get out of hand, their chatter doesn’t really seem to be as annoying as other talking heads looking to fill up time. They occasionally bicker back and forth, but it’s nothing that would make your eyes roll or seems forced. While Joe Buck bores people to death, Chris Collinsworth makes you want to wring his neck, and Al Micheals sounds generic as hell, these three are actually fun to listen to. They also don’t insult the intelligence of those listening, which is a pet peeve of mine. They know your watching the game because your a fan, they don’t remind you what offsides is every time it happens.
Even more important is what Goose brings to the game. As far as I know he is the only male sideline reporter out there. AND HE MAKES IT WORK. Instead of just standing around, looking good and getting pointless interviews with coaches who will admit nothing about injuries, he is able to give actual input. That’s right, he’s able to give great input about the game and what is going on in a position that is dominated by clueless airheads because you shouldn’t be able to analyze the game from that perspective. Most people have an overhead view of the game and the monitors 3 inches from their faces, and he picks up on stuff better then most of them.
Prime time Football announcers are some of the worst, most of them are only putting themselves up there to seem like geniuses. There seems to be a real disconnect between the average guy and most of these announcers. That’s what makes the Albert/Moose/Goose combo so great, they seem like your buddies. They are painfully underrated, especially being behind the horror show that is Joe Buck announcing anything. If you happen to have the pleasure of catching these guys sometime, go for it. It’s really a treat, no matter how bad the game is.
Last night during Monday Night Football in the fourth quarter ESPN went to a long shot of the crowd (and by crowd I mean 3 to 6 people) who while on camera proceeded to chant Tebow. While Orton had his struggles last night, blaming the loss on him is a bit much. Especially considering from all reports that Tebow looked awful in the preseason compared to both Kyle Orton and Brady Quinn. While it isn’t new for a struggling team to be chanting for the 2nd or 3rd string QB to be put in, or them to start chanting during the first game while it was still winnable is a bit new.
Tebow has been the darling of ESPN since his college days, a charismatic star with a questionable level of talent. So is it crazy to wonder if ESPN just happened to find a few drunk Broncos fans last night chanting for Tebow? It gives them something to talk about, and keeps their created monster in the news. Speaking of news, it also gives their nonstop talking heads something to gab about in between games since the Everything Sports Network is Football talk 90% of the time.
Tebow isn’t going to save the Broncos, and there’s a reason he’s not starting. There were times last night when Orton was able to get the ball away with Raiders breathing down his neck (nice O-Line Denver) when a younger QB might rush the throw or a mobile QB might hold the ball too long. Even with Orton’s fumble, there were plenty of chances for another less experienced QB to screw up.
While there will always be a vocal part of the Denver fanbase that wants Tebow in (just try bashing him on twitter) most of them realize why he isn’t a starter or even the backup QB at the moment. Leave it to ESPN to try and push the issue via their hijacking of Monday Night Football. More and more, ESPN is using it’s popularity to push their own points. Without controversy there is nothing to talk about. With 3 networks and the 24/7 ESPNews all needing something to talk about, it’s no surprise that Tebow is front page news. But in the end it’s all manufactured. Tebow is a product of ESPN as much as this controversy. The reality is that if the Broncos want to win, Tebow will be nowhere near the field.
If your sitting there chanting and arguing that Tebow should be on the field, your nothing but a tool for ESPN. Your not thinking critically at all, and your just parroting them. There’s no special magical ability that Tebow has that is going to make the defense stop the run, or magically make his WRs catch every pass. Get over it.
If I had to make a startup league, the first thing I would do is start chasing down all the best players in the nation who aren’t smart enough or couldn’t academically make it into Division 1 schools. Also I don’t care about the new naming for the Divisions, it’s still 1, 2 and 3 for me. I would also try to plunder one or two top players in order to get into the papers and make a lot of noise. I’d offer the kids enough money that they could pay their way through college later if the league failed. The absolute last thing I would do is bring in NFL re-treads. It always makes new leagues look bad.
My feeling is that when you look at players who are undrafted or late round picks and end up having big careers, there are some players who never get the chance because they couldn’t academically make a top school. This of course is partially due to the NFL using the NCAA as a free developmental league. I for one think that the NFL and NCAA ties really need to be cut. Not only that, but these NCAA kids should be getting paid considering the amount of profit made off of them.
But I would collect the best HS kids from each region and make 6 regional teams. I would try to get smaller local fields for the games, because nothing looks worse then a half empty football stadium. Just ask the XFL. The league would start the week before the Super Bowl, playing on Sunday, then Saturday the next week and Sunday for the rest of the season for 10 games. The two best records would play in the championship game.
Following that, players who move on to greener pastures or are cut can be replaced by players from your region. If by the beginning of training camp someone isn’t with a team or considered a team’s property they are a free agent. The league will continue running a spring schedule until it’s gotten up to 12 teams. Along with increasing regional teams, hopefully grabbing more and more big name youngsters to join the league instead of going to the NCAA.
The last phase would be to move the league to a fall schedule, hopefully on Saturdays as an experiment to see how it works before moving to Sundays. If it fails we go back to the spring schedule. With the amount of profit the NFL is making, and the number of insanely talented youngsters in the NCAA, if there’s any sport that’s ripe for a competitor league it’s the NFL. It’s sad that leagues instead of trying to create new stars are taking washed up retreads from the NFL, making them automatically an inferior league.
Not exactly surprising. Of course Goodell is just going to tell himself that these are a handful of fans who are greatly mistaken. But the owners have done everything possibly wrong if they were trying to win the PR battle. The fact that the league decided to end the CBA early, that the owners won’t open the books, that most fans don’t want an 18 game schedule, etc … It’s not just a pocket of fans that happened to have been at the draft last night. You could put fans from just about anywhere across the nation and the reaction would have been the same. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
I wonder behind the scenes what’s going on. Owners have been forcing local and state governments to pay for their new stadiums. The lockout looks largely to be the fault of the Owners. Do the owners owe these communities games? Should the owners pay back some of these communities if there aren’t games? I really would love to see what would happen if for example the city of Philly sued the Eagles for not having games. That’s what the owners would deserve, a little payback for holding cities ransom over new stadiums.
It’s easy to make multi-millionaire sports athletes look bad. Especially when it was the NHLPA and MLBPA trying their best to not get a salary cap. But at just about every turn so far it seems the Owners are doing everything to be the villains here. It’s like that South Park episode in which Lars Ulrich complained that he had to get a regular tiger cage, and not a golden tiger cage.
The last few years the “Everything” Sports Programming Network has largely been Football and Basketball. They were buoyed in this by the NHL’s jump to VS following the lockout, and their parent network ABC’s ownership of NFL (originally Monday Night now Sunday Night) and Basketball. It hasn’t been a bad business for the most part, as both sports cover the fall/winter/spring. But with the NFL lockout, you can sort of tell there’s a sick desperation on their side of things. Basketball is looking like it’s going to lockout too.
The question is, will there be enough sports around to talk 24 hours for? ESPN takes a dead horse and beats it deader then words can describe. And that’s with sports going on. Sure NASCAR and MLS exist and ESPN could talk about those two entities. But with Nascar only running one race a week and MLS not being taken seriously by Soccer fans, could they really full up their programming with that? ESPN has created this monster themselves and it’ll be funny to see what the outcome is. Ever since Disney (which owns ABC) bought ESPN they have been giving superior treatment to sports which are broadcast on either ABC or one of the ESPN networks. They could have given a fair shake to the NHL and any number of sports considering they have 24/7 sports coverage on multiple networks. But over the last few years it seems that ESPN exists mainly to hype their own propeties.
I hope both leagues miss this season and ESPN is screwed. If I was Gary Bettman I’d ignore ESPN. They are going to treat the NHL like the prettiest girl at the prom. But the second the NBA and NFL come back it’s going to be the bastard red-haired child again. There is no reason to believe that ESPN is going to magically start spreading it’s coverage around to keep this from happening in the future. Nope, it’s going to ride the NBA and NFL (is Farve coming back?) like it always had and leave the NHL out to pasture.
It’s funny that I dislike ESPN as much as I do now. Even Sportscenter I can’t stand anymore. I mean it used to be THE SHOW for me to watch in the morning and get all my sports updates for. But the way they do Sportscenter now, it just doesn’t feel like it’s bringing you news and highlights. It feels like it’s just being used as a promotions tool. To make matters even worse, you can seemingly never tell when the show stops or starts. So instead of watching for an hour and being up to date, an hour in you find yourself wondering where the first news story you had caught was.
To make matters worse, most of the shows on ESPN are unwatchable or overkill. The few bits of Sports Nation I’ve seen make me question anyone who watches it’s sanity. Meanwhile Around The Horn and Pardon The Interruption, while good ideas, are played back to back and talk about nearly the same dam topics. A lot of the other shows have questionable hosts/co-hosts when it comes to ESPN bringing in far too many former players to host. Now while some players can add a lot to the conversation, the addition of seemingly every QB whose ever played in the NFL seems a bit disingenuous. It’s like they are hiring these guys (Trent Dilfer cough) just because they want to hang out with them.
I’ve ranted enough about ESPN, I just can’t wait to see what they do if both the NBA and NFL are locked out. Hopefully the NHL doesn’t sign a deal with them, and ESPN gets to lay in the bed it’s made.
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