Serenity now. One would think that the defending champion Steelers losing to the 1-11 Browns, Thursday night, would be more than enough to keep a guy stuck on the NFL Network. But I kept returning to SNY to a game I already had seen several times, Game 5 of the Orioles-Mets 1969 World Series.
Two reasons, I suspect:
1. The NBC commentators on the baseball game were Curt Gowdy and Lindsey Nelson. They were so easy on the senses. Often, neither said a word between pitches. In 1969, sportscasters who once only had known radio had a better understanding of TV than those today trained to work televised games.
2. Every time I switched back to Steelers-Browns, Matt Millen, who also gives speeches for ESPN, was giving a speech. And they often seemed designed to sound cool while filling space — like talking garnish — when silence would have done the trick. To that end, Millen is hardly alone.
WR Santonio Holmes was playing for the Steelers. It apparently didn’t matter to Millen nor anyone else who has called a Steelers game on national TV this season that Holmes’ excessive showboating nearly cost the Steelers the last Super Bowl; it only cost them their last timeout. No matter, he’s going to keep on me-dancing.
Such recent history, at least among TV’s NFL experts, is either ignored or forgotten. For all those “We spoke with Coach [Mike] Tomlin about such and such after practice yesterday,” apparently no one asks Tomlin why Holmes’ mefirst, game/team-second behavior is allowed to persist.
Then again, as a Steeler, Holmes has been arrested three times, including once for assault against the mother of his daughter, and that’s not something that TV folks, for all their speech-making, are bound to bring up. If you can ignore that, I suppose ignoring everything else comes easily.
So, Thursday, Holmes caught a 19-yard pass and immediately was tackled. He rose and began demonstrating his great self-regard. Not that there’s a good time to act excessively immodest, but at this particular time the Steelers were losing, 13-3, to a 1-11 team. And then Millen began to spiel about how Holmes has become a go-to guy, a speech that concluded with this insult to his audience that could see better: “He’s maturing in front of your eyes.”
And so it was back to Game 5 of the 1969 World Series. Ahh, that’s better.
Al, ditch QB-rating statistics
Apparently, Al Michaels was upset by my suggestion that because he’s so reliant on a senseless statistic — quarterback passer ratings — he explained on the air how the stat is formulated. He only needed 20 minutes.
So near the end of NBC’s Vikings-Cardinals game, after pointing to the QB ratings the game had produced, he referenced, with displeasure, what I had written about his misdirected affection for these stats. He acknowledged that they are “complicated … and very imprecise, in some ways,” but claimed they still produce accurate reflections of a quarterback’s value.
After all these years Michaels needs a mathematical formula to distinguish the better quarterbacks from the rest?
Funny, one of the few who have taken the time to examine the QB ratings stat in relation to what actually occurs in games, is Michaels’ NBC Sunday night colleague, studio host Bob Costas. He, too, concluded that the stat is ridiculous.
So here’s the deal, Al. If the stat’s complicated but legit, just explain this:
How is it that these nine — Trent Green, Mark Brunnell, Jake Delhomme, Neil O’Donnell, Marc Bulger, Ken O’Brien, Brian Griese, Brad Johnson and Jeff George — have higher career passer ratings than these eight — John Elway, Dan Fouts, Johnny Unitas, Terry Bradshaw , Sid Luckman, “Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, Bob Griese, Fran Tarkenton and Joe Namath, all Hall of Famers?
Al, why not just encourage NBC to lose the stat?
More NFL freeze-fests on the way
Oh, the weather outside is frightening. . . . As NFL teams are trying to unload PSLs on wealthy suckers — they’re hard to find — consider the message the NFL is sending current ticket holders. The following are made-for-TV December outdoors night games:
Baltimore at Green Bay, Pittsburgh at Cleveland, Philadelphia at Giants, Giants at Washington, Dallas at Washington, Minnesota at Chicago.
Freeze, you suckers, freeze! Then try to make it home by 1 a.m. on a work/school night. Hurry, hurry, get your PSLs!
A Wall Street Journal piece on PSLs, last week, concluded: “Realizing a gain on your PSL rests to a large degree on finding a greater fool, or fan, to sell to.”
Yet Commissioner Goodell endorses PSLs as a “good investment.” Is he and/or the NFL liable for such a claim? I have a feeling that someday, perhaps through a class action, we will find out.
Lookalikes
With Peter Gammons this week moving from ESPN to MLB Network, we have been reminded that Gammons still resembles Andrew Jackson, as seen on $20 bills.