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To borrow from Comic Book Guy, a character in “The Simpsons” — “Worst telecast, ever! ”
For ESPN, “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” to have presented a worse production of a national prime-time NFL game than Monday’s Rams-Giants is unfathomable, maybe even impossible. (At least we’ve got that going for us.)
Even by ESPN’s excessive and just plain dopey standards, this one stood out. By the second half, I had surrendered. I was done hollering at the TV, shaking my head, cackling and taking notes. But, too late for the rain forest, I already had filled a legal pad:
* Jon Gruden. Oy! He spoke endlessly, much of it say-anything nonsense. Early in the first quarter he got rolling with an impressive one-sentence contradiction:
“The Rams are facing a talented but decimated defense. You’ve gotta take advantage of that.”
What? How does that work? The injured talented players were replaced by equally or even more talented players? So take advantage of them?
After Eli Manning hit Hakeem Nicks for a quick-turn, left end-zone TD, Gruden first hit the cliché button: “Nicks is really coming into his own” — I never have understood what that means — then reached for the Joe Morgan Fantasy Activator: “Eli Manning and Hakeem Nicks, they run the fly-stop as well as any combination on the planet!”
Really? Who knew? Certainly not Giants followers.
If Gruden’s orders were to wreck the telecast, he gave it his best shot.
* Ron Jaworski gave it a shot, too. Early in ESPN’s Aug. 22 Bears-Giants preseason game, he said he went through Manning’s interception reel to find that only “18 of them were his fault. There were batted balls, tipped balls. It shows up as 25 picks, but they weren’t all his.”
So what did Jaworski say early in Monday’s telecast? “You think back to last year. Eli Manning threw [his emphasis] 25 interceptions, and he’s just gotta be careful with the football.”
Nurse! Not only did he contradict his own fact-finding and reporting, he followed that with expert, been-there quarterbacking advice that could have been provided by your sister-in-law.
* Mike Tirico tried, too. After Michael Boley picked up a behind-the-QB pass and ran for a TD — RB Cadillac Williams dropped the pass/lateral — Tirico excused Williams with this:
“Williams did not get a lot of work, as he got here in a short training camp. … It was a physical error, right through his hands.”
Thus Tirico missed the impossible to miss. The next error Williams made was both mental and inexcusable. After he dropped the pass, he was the closest to the ball, yet he just stood and looked at it. He either didn’t know or care that it was a live ball!
And how could all three miss what happened next? After Boley scored, he had to make a scene. He’s a pro, isn’t he? So he tried to fire the ball against the end zone wall. Instead, he beaned a Giants employee, who was standing beside a videographer, in the head. Not a mention of that!
More: An unsportsmanlike foul against the Giants became an off-screen mystery as ESPN was locked into a photo package of Rams coach Steve Spagnuolo’s prior gigs.
And more: Did Gruden and Jaworski both miss the fact that two Giant DBs allowed WR Danario Alexander to rise, after making a catch, then run 25 yards to the Giants’ 1? Must have. They just talked over it. Game? What game? Where?
* ESPN’s graphics were, as usual, an insult to trained seals, dancing bears and chimps in diapers.
They ranged from the inexcusably wrong — Rams KR/WR Greg Salas was ID’ed as “Salinas” — to the ESPN-standard nonsense as news:
A “Stat Alert” graphic — a Stat Alert? — brought circumstantially irrelevant third-down conversion numbers. If someone woke you up to alert you to such info, you would punch him.
* The preposterously bad carried into the frenetic, bad-by-design halftime show. Adam Schefter reported that injured Dallas WR Miles Austin “could be out until the bye week.”
He will be back to play in Dallas’s bye week? Fascinating. “Throw it to Austin! He’s wide open!”
To think that all we did wrong was tune in to try to watch a ballgame. It brought to mind Groucho Marx’s aside to the audience in the 1932 film “Horse Feathers”: “I’ve got to stay here, but there’s no reason why you folks shouldn’t go out to the lobby until this thing blows over.”
Don’t forget milestone souvenir
Pinstripe Pride has been lost — sold — replaced by a plan that identifies Yankees fans as just-got-off-the-Greyhound dupes. New Yankee Stadium is a clip-joint and no accomplishment by even the grandest Yankee is free from classless, in-yer-faces efforts to reach even deeper into your pockets.
The instant Mariano Rivera closed his 602nd save Monday, TV and radio ads — narrated by the repugnant Voice of the Yankees, John Sterling — hit the air, and emails hit the Internet pitching Rivera-autographed baseballs for $200 (small print: shipping and handling not included, display stand not included), as sold by the Yankees’ official memorabilia and game-used dirt peddler, Steiner Collectibles.
Apparently, these autographed baseballs are different, because Steiner ads emphasize in bold, capital letters that they are “hand signed.”
Hmm, how much for those signed by Mo’s toes? Or those signed “Mariano Rivera” by someone else? Does the Yankees’ contracted collectibles company sell a lot of autographed merchandise that’s not hand-signed by the fella whose name is on it?
Why, if Rivera and Derek Jeter are such extraordinarily classy men and if the Yankees are such a pride-driven organization, do they approve, participate in and profit from such ugly sells? Hey, if you’re all starving and you could use a few bucks …
What would Lou Gehrig have said? “Today, I consider myself, the Steiner Collectibles folks and those in the Yankees organization who eagerly take their cut, the luckiest men on the face of the earth.”
* So what’s ex-con and ex-NBA ref and game-fixer Tim Donaghy up to, these days? He’s a sports gambling tout, a scamdicapper. No foolin’. Perhaps he can buy ad time from WFAN and Wilpons-owned SNY, both back to selling time to scamdicappers eager to con the vulnerable in the audiences.
* I can fix this for the NCAA: How about the Big Far East? Or the Pacific 10 Atlantic Division? Or the Atlantic Coast Conference Great Lakes League? Or we could cut to the money chase and have just four conferences: ESPN East, ESPN West, ESPN North and ESPN South. “SportsCenter” is next!