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Here’s mud in your ears!
ESPN and Jon Gruden on Monday night celebrated Gruden’s new, five-year contract to continue destroying “Monday Night Football” telecasts by allowing Gruden to destroy another “Monday Night Football” telecast. Cheers!
From Joe Morgan to Joe Theismann to Jon Gruden, long-term embracement of those who kill the simple pleasure of watching a football or baseball game has become an ESPN thing, a gift generously shared with the nation.
Gruden not only has what ESPN finds most attractive in its top analysts — the eager ability to talk all game — he has the bonus skill of talking lots of nonsense, including frequent ignore-what-you-see/believe-what-I-say speeches, a talent that can push discerning viewers toward crisis hotlines.
Throughout Monday’s Dolphins-Jets game, Gruden again tested the limits of patience and belief. After a first-quarter Darelle Revis interception and 100-yard return, Gruden immediately took the position that Revis had committed pass interference.
Given two opportunities to amend or at least soften his position — replays showed that Brandon Marshall ran straight into Revis — Gruden held tightly to his assertion. Apparently, then, according to Gruden, every receiver should just run directly into every defensive back — jump on them, especially near the goal line — and expect a defensive interference call.
Not even after Marshall was seen on the sideline in an animated chat with a coach — trace evidence that he blew the pattern, that he should have approached Revis then quickly cut left, which was where the ball was thrown — Gruden stuck to his story.
And he was just getting started.
In the third quarter, following a short first-down run by Shonn Greene, Gruden declared that Greene, with the help of the Jets offensive line, was “imposing his will” on the Dolphins. Really? Moments earlier a graphic appeared showing that the Jets had run 14 times for 35 yards.
The systemic absurdity of ESPN’s biggest-ticket telecasts, if you could get through this latest, lasted all game.
From Gruden’s bold but childish declaration that all “judgment” calls and non-calls should be subjected to replay review — yeah, we’ll call it “Monday Night Through Wednesday Morning Football” — to losing story lines to ceaseless gab — er, fellas, that was right guard Brandon Moore, who’d objected to Santonio Holmes’ knock on the Jets offensive line, days earlier, who trotted to the end zone to congratulate Holmes — Einstein’s description of insanity again showed up as ESPN’s game plan.
A telling reality of ESPN’s er, approach, is that six years on the job no one is quite sure if “MNF” play-by-play man Mike Tirico is any good at it. ESPN throws him into a three-man booth — plus everything else — as if he’s the host, chair ump, caterer and usher at a ping-pong match.
Oh, well, I suppose, by now, ESPN knows what it’s doing. “SportsCenter” is next! “SportsCenter” is next! “SportsCenter” is next!
Stats a tough loss
You like football stats as much as media experts? Northwestern, Saturday, kicked Iowa’s statistical fannies:
Total plays: NW 92, Iowa 50. First downs: NW 29, Iowa 17. Total yards: NW 495, Iowa 379. Third down conversions: NW 16/22, Iowa 1/7. Time of possession: NW 38:23, Iowa 21:37.
What a butt-whoopin’!
Final score? Oh, Iowa won, 41-31.
* Give credit to Bud Selig and his mirthful band of team and commissioner-owning puppeteers for this: The World Series, again, seems nothing like the World Series; it no longer seems special. It’s now more like the finals, after a 162-game season, of an eight-team raffle or an acey-ducey contest.
* Mike Francesa got one thing right — and right from the start: When you’re a head coach as mouthy and as coarse as Rex Ryan, failure becomes amplified. Your act becomes more quickly worn, less easily indulged. And when you keep at it …
* From what we now know, it was astonishing that so many Mets made it to that ’86 parade.
* So what happens now when the 49ers draw flags — game-changing flags — for unsportsmanlike conduct? What does head coach Jim Harbaugh tell them?
* Reader Steve Arendash, noting that an ESPN graphic read, “Jets snap three-game winless streak,” wonders, as long as the Jets didn’t tie any of those games, why it didn’t simply read “Jets snap three-game losing streak.” Why? Because it’s ESPN, that’s why.
* Bend and Stretch, Reach for the Sky: Saturday, the Big Ten Network’s “Big Ten Icons” show focused on Joe Paterno and the Nittany Lions’ ‘86 national championship. Penn State didn’t join the Big Ten until 1990.
Take hypocrite Gumbel seriously? Get ‘Real’
Mixed messages for $500, Alex: It was the noted 20th Century child philosopher, Stymie, who said, “I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way!”
* ESPN recently dumped Hank Williams Jr. for some impolitic words about President Obama. A few days later, ESPN hired new Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen as a World Series analyst. As manger of the White Sox, Guillen was in the habit of publicly speaking the impolitic, including the denigration of one of his media detractors as “a faggot.”
* Over to HBO, where “Real Sports” host Bryant Gumbel compared David Stern to “some kind of modern plantation overseer.”
Sorry, can’t fall for such obvious attention-bait. Gumbel knows better about both American history and the NBA to make such a tired and pathetic analogy, one more liable to cause nausea than outrage. NBA players are off-loaded from slave ships and herded against their will into the NBA? And he certainly must know that NBA players, unlike slaves, have the right to quit. So how come they don’t?
This is the same man who, on the same show in 2006, mocked the Winter Olympics as having too many white athletes — making the Games “look like a GOP convention” — to be taken seriously as athletes.
Gumbel may claim to be serious, but, please. Need attention? Try sky-diving off the GW Bridge. Oh, that’s been done, too?
* FOX graphics, plus Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, can show-and-tell us in every World Series telecast that Tony La Russa’s the third-winningest manager in MLB history. In McCarver’s case, he can tell us, as he did in Game 1, that La Russa succeeded because, “He’s innovative, resourceful and smart.”
But unless we’re told that he, far more than most managers, was enabled by his players’ obvious PED use, the full story isn’t being told. Yes, La Russa was innovative, resourceful and smart — smart enough to play dumb about the innovative resourcefulness of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.