If we were to conclude the greatest commercial invention is the snow globe, how well would they sell if their exclusive manufacturers decided to paint their outsides, so, no matter how hard you shook them, you couldn’t see in?
I apologize, but it’s tough to come up with an analogy that captures the ridiculous dirt that TV has done to football. Networks now spend billions for rights, then do everything they can, including copying other networks’ worst ideas, to wreck the telecasts.
Sports TV people simply won’t allow TV to be TV. They commit lunacide, trying to make TV everything else — everything less.
Starting with FOX’s Friday Cotton Bowl, through Saturday’s Bengals-Texans playoff game on NBC, one could have watched — tried to watch — nearly eight consecutive hours of football and been left with the inescapable sense that not even one play — an incomplete pass, a 2-yard run — spoke for itself. FOX’s Charles Davis made a speech after every play, then NBC’s Mike Mayock did the same.
And beyond the endless, often contradictory filibusters, both telecasts applied artificial visual distractions to shed more darkness on the subject.
Mayock was particularly aggravating, making a long story out of every short and self-evident one. He would over-analyze a corn muffin. He so carefully avoids the short, simple and sensible it’s as if he’s paid by the syllable. Defenders don’t jump to knock down passes, they “elevate.”
Rather than say nothing, he would throw in that someone has “to try to make a play, here.” Is there a time when someone doesn’t?
A significant late hit call on Texans DE Antonio Smith went ignored so Mayock could swoon over two replays of Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton stepping away from pressure to complete a short pass — a standard act (after all, I played intramural football) that nonetheless inspired more awe in Mayock than in Dorothy when she first saw the Emerald City.
Did Mayock expect Dalton, a righty, to take the sack when there was space to his right?
In a close game, Cincinnati had third-and-half-a-yard from its own 17 when Mayock said: “If you want to take a shot, here, Andy Dalton, you can.” Of course he could, but why in the name of Joe Pisarcik would he?
The telecast became so smothered in gaseous wind that play-by-player Tom Hammond, generally a reliable nuts-and-bolts guy, got lost. As NBC showed a Texans player preparing to field a punt and the Bengals in punt formation, Hammond declared: “And on fourth-and-3, Cincinnati will go for it.”
For all the word pollution, things worth discussing went unspoken. For example, how was Pacman Jones, now a Cincinnati DB, still eligible to play in the NFL? With all those graphics, why not list highlights from his rap sheet? And why would the Bengals, the team most regretfully undone by criminality over the last decade, sign Jones?
Instead, Mayock went on and on (and on, and on, and on), about “dime packages,” “backside defenses” and the uncanny ability of Dalton to know that he should throw the ball toward players on his team.
But this is the new norm on every network’s telecasts. That we know that it makes no sense and bad TV doesn’t matter. TV’s shot-callers, who don’t know good from bad, don’t care what we think. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be the new norm, would it?
Can’t Weight to see Sir Charles’ next ‘scam’
There’s no accounting for the unaccountability of Charles Barkley. Last week, he was caught on TV, during what he thought was an unseen and unheard commercial break in an NBA game, merrily telling Reggie Miller and Kevin Harlan that his new Weight Watchers endorsement deal is a big “scam.”
But there he was, during the weekend’s NFL telecasts, starring in a Weight Watchers ad.
And there he was at halftime of NBC’s Bengals-Texans, promoting his appearance later that night on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” a show that once parodied such people.
There’s nothing Barkley can do — commercial fraud, $400,000 in gambling debts, excessive drinking, a DWI arrest (while engaging a hooker) — that can diminish his status as a TV go-to guy.
And, as a social critic, he’s still able to find the time and audacity to tell us what’s wrong with the world.
* The habit-formed senselessness of waiting until football games have begun to focus on starting lineups made background TV out of a lost Saints fumble on Saturday, as NBC was busy showing the Lions’ starting defense.
Meanwhile, the starting lineups shown often aren’t, or they change after the first play, as they did in Bengals-Texans.
Yet TV continues to think of them and present them as baseball lineups, as if everyone will play the first few innings. But if TV wants to treat football as baseball then do so the right way — give the lineups before the kickoff/first pitch!
* Rare Earth: Saturday, UConn men’s and women’s basketball teams lost.
Islanders keep the Jigg goin’
Jiggs McDonald was in Anaheim on Friday, to call the Islanders against the Ducks on MSG-Plus. With current analyst Butch Goring’s voice close to that of former analyst Ed Westfall’s, it sounded like a live throwback telecast.
* The Mets’ claim the firm it just hired, one specializing in bankruptcies, has nothing to do with the chance of the Mets filing for bankruptcy, brings to mind the Wilpons’ claim that Bernie Madoff’s bust had no impact on the team’s financial health. That claim later was amended by Fred Wilpon, who said Madoff cost him “half a billion, cash.”
* It’s all so predictably stupid.
The Giants, yesterday, had fourth-and-1-inch when FOX posted this graphic for your application and enlightenment: “Giants 4 of 13 on 4th down this season.”
And Joe Buck read it aloud for emphasis! Fourth and an inch, fourth and 15 yards, they’re all the same!
* Is there no one at ESPN to tell Matt Millen there’s a concussion crisis? Millen’s repeated demands and celebrations for “going helmet-to-helmet” and “laying a hat on someone” are nauseating.
* Why, you ask, during intros, did Texans give their elementary schools or high schools as their alma maters? Perhaps the producer asked them to name the last school from which they graduated.