Sports

NBC GETS ‘F’ ON HISTORY TEST

IT took until six minutes were left in the first half of the first game of this NFL season for TV to remind us how preposterously over-produced NFL telecasts have become. OK, so this season, TV was a few minutes late.

Apparently for no good reason other than to prove it could, NBC got off the Saints-Colts game to throw it down to sideline reporter Andrea Kremer. Normally highly credible, Kremer this time delivered a fantastic second-hand American history lesson, the kind that would cause laughter among serious historians and motion sickness in Coast Guardsmen.

Kremer spoke of Tony Dungy’s daughter: “Her college professors told her they’d witnessed many historical events – Martin Luther King being put in jail, African-Americans gaining voting rights – and they equated Tony Dungy winning the Super Bowl with those monumental events.”

If only Kremer had added one line: “And that’s just ridiculous.” But she didn’t. Good grief.

For starters, the two head coaches in last season’s Super Bowl were African-American, thus Dungy’s team winning it had no more significance than if the other team had. That the winning team’s head coach would be a black man was a lock two weeks before the game was played.

But to equate the outcome of any football game in 2007 with any significant event from the Civil Rights Movement of 40-50 years ago can’t even be excused as a stretch or a pandering trivialization; it’s a perversion, a frontal attack on the good senses.

Martin Luther King being arrested for leading a desegregation march and thrown into the Birmingham city jail on the Friday before Easter in 1963, and Tony Dungy’s team winning the 2007 Super Bowl – yep, historical events with roughly the same significance. Who were the Colts playing, the Ku Klux Klan? Good grief.

But, one way or another, football telecasts have become anticipated exercises in obscuring the games and destroying realities in favor of something else, anything else and everything else, but especially the absurd. And before Game 1 of the 2007 season was even half over, that promise had been met.

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Grate Expectations: When Roger Clemens agreed, and for a small fee, to narrate a DVD, “Baseball’s Most Unbreakable Feats,” the folks at MLB Productions did an “Uh-oh.” They prepared for the arrival of a demanding, impatient superstar who would be a total pain in the fanny. Clemens, after all, would be handed, gulp, a 32-page voiceover script.

But Clemens, reports MLB Productions’ senior writer Jeff Scott, showed up eager to please.

“He was, start to finish, more than cooperative; he was a pleasure,” Scott said.

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Go Figure: Reader Paul Winston of Manhattan usually doesn’t do the math, but SNY’s graphics Monday got him thinking. In the top of the first, he read that Carlos Beltran, career against Reds pitcher Aaron Harang, was batting “.278, five-for-15.” Hmmm, that seems kinda low for .333.

In the bottom of the first he read that the Reds, under interim manager Pete Mackanin, were “31-24, .648.” But that’s .564. But who’s counting?

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Same Time, This Year: Every year, the U.S. Open features at least one great match that goes widely unseen because it began much too late and ended well into the next morning. And every year the USTA acknowledges that’s both a shame and a mistake.

And every year, it happens again. Thus, or so I’m told, what should be regarded as among this Open’s most compelling matches (James Blake over Stefan Koubek; David Ferrer over No. 2 seed Rafael Nadal) might as well have been played in Katmandu. Both ended after 1 a.m. Brilliant.

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Friday was the fourth anniversary of what had to be, and must remain, the game that produced the greatest number of losers in the history of football pools.

On Sept. 7, 2003, the Dolphins opened the season at home against the second-year Texans. And as the biggest favorite on the board (13 points), the Dolphins, from Maine to Alaska, were regarded as the one safe pick for survivor/suicide/elimination pools, in which one only has to pick the outright winner to stay alive. No one wants to go out, for heaven’s sake, in Week 1.

So everyone did.

When the Texans beat the Dolphins, survivor pools, after Week 1, were reduced by 80-90 percent; if 200 entries were in a pool, maybe 25 remained. Throughout the country, second pools quickly started.

It happened four years ago this past Friday. I can’t prove it, but Texans 21, Dolphins 20 had to be the most calamitous and cursed result in the history of gambling on football.

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Keith Hernandez, Wednesday on SNY, after it was said Brandon Phillips had broken Joe Morgan‘s single-season home run record for Reds second basemen: “Joe Morgan could do it all. And he’d be the first to tell you.”

Pete Silverman has been named senior executive producer of 1050 ESPN Radio. That makes for an interesting set of circumstances. As a longtime exec at MSG Network, Silverman was popular and a pro, just the kind of exec who couldn’t survive Jim Dolan. Now, because 1050 has Knicks and Rangers games, Silverman again must deal with Dolan’s Garden.

phil.mushnick@nypost.com