Final Thoughts before the Super Bowl

With only hours to go before the last game of this season, some football musings:

-What does the NFL think it's accomplishing having a regular season game in London? Are British fans suddenly so hardcore that pre-season games aren't good enough for them? As a measure of how excited Brits are over this, the Feb. 2 announcement was unreported in the London Times. And of course the loss of one of only eight home games is significant for both the team and the fans.

-I don't even want to think about how many Ted Johnson-type stories there must be out there.

-Nice to see Thurman Thomas get his induction to Canton. The guy was definitely one of the NFL's elite RBs, along with Emmitt Smith and Barry Sanders, for a good number of years, and was a versatile weapon in the Bills' no-huddle offense. Recent all-purpose backs like Marshall Faulk and Reggie Bush must have especially high respect for him. Still, you wonder if the reason that he didn't make it in on his first try is that the most enduring image of him is, unfortunately, this one.

-While we're on the subject of the Hall of Fame, call me a homer, but Kuechenberg got robbed.

-Why is Terrell Owens hugging Donovan McNabb at a party in Miami a news story?

-Nice call getting Prince for the halftime show. Should be the complete opposite of last year's tepid, phoned-in performance by the Stones.

-Bill Parcells: all the guy did was turn around one franchise after another. Retires as one of the all-time coaching legends, in the same class as Lombardi, Shula, Walsh, and indeed Belichick.

-Colts 30, Bears 17.

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Heisman Hype...

... and what the award has in common with Paris Hilton.

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Powered Out, by Sara Hatch

A professor of mine once said “there’s something inherent in America, in our national psyche that loves rankings.” He was talking about ranking presidents, but the statement works equally well for the NFL and the current obsession with Power Rankings.

Power Rankings are a way for a fan to know that his team is best. With the shortest schedule of the four major sports, it’s almost a given that at least two teams each week will have the same record. How can these teams be qualified? How is one to know for sure that an 8-5 is better than a 7-6 team? They can’t. Thus, Power Rankings. But as this past Sunday’s slate of game shows, even Power Rankings can’t predict the future, much less how whether or not a team is good or just great.

Fans want to know that their 7-6 team is better than your 7-6 team, and they are great ways for commentators to wax poetical about why one team is better than the other despite the fact they’ve lost two more games. At the beginning of the season, everyone considered the Giants as definite contenders. They lived up to the expectations for the first half of the season, going 6-2. They then lost 4 games in a row; falling from spot 6 in ESPN.com's rankings down to 15, and then back up to 11 with one win over a lackluster Carolina team. There is no formula to the madness, no logic to the numbers. It was a crucial game that the Giants needed to win and they stood up and did it. But they’re still not guaranteed a playoff spot, much less a win next week. Their rise to spot 11 means nothing all that much.

It matters even less when you get to the top of the rankings. Indianapolis has a worse ranking than the Saints but a better record, as does Chicago. But all have looked capable of an almost total implosion. Ranking reveals little, as evidenced by the ESPN-ranked #9 Seahawks falling to the #29 Cardinals. It’s all a big guessing game, and hardly a perfect science.

ESPN is not the perpetrator of Power Rankings. Many sites have them and everyone has a different opinion about who’s the best and who is the most likely to fall on the spikes of defeat. The best example of is Profootballtalk.com’s short and pithy Power Rankings that dispense with trying to make some sense of a crazy NFL season where good NFC teams look like peewee football and bad AFC teams beat up on perennial favorites.

Great examples from last week their characterizations of the Falcons (“Finger-flickin’ bad”), the Patriots (“Junior, say-ow”), and the Buccaneers (“Yo ho yuck”). This week’s offerings are no less entertaining: Panthers (“Show your Weinke”), Bears (“Gross, man”), and Lions (“Try softball?”).

This is what sports coverage really needs, a good dose of not taking itself a little too seriously. Great minds of football can predict all they like, try to explain why the Colts implode with regularity, and sing the praises of LaDanian Tomlinson and Philip Rivers. But good old comedy always gets the job done. And editors are always yelling, “tighten, tighten, tighten!” Finally, someone is listening.

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Put On Your Sunday Best, by Sara Hatch

Years ago, ESPN conceived its brainchild Sunday Night Football to give some competition to the Monday Night network stalwart. Sunday Night Football has long been MNF’s inferior cousin, but with the regular season winding down, I’ve come to a realization: Sunday Night Football has superseded Monday Night Football as the premium prime-time game.

Sunday night is a better night for football. During the week, there are major shows to compete with, which isn’t really a factor on Sunday night. The biggest hit on Sunday night is Desperate Housewives, which I have a hard time believing pulls all that many viewers away from football. Also, the game starts earlier on Sunday. It’s not a complete and total deal-breaker to stay up often until one for the end of the game, especially if your team is playing, but it’s very hard once the week has started. Staying up on Sunday night is no picnic, but it’s still technically the weekend.

Monday Night Football has become the NFL’s spectacle. The ornate and long pregame revelry and the commercials that last forever and interrupt at every possible turn have made the game a stalled, badly paced event. (One week they actually brought the guy who sings the Monday Night Football theme up into the booth to talk during the game.) Even the announcers are of the sort that makes it harder to focus on the game over whatever they’re blasting off about that week. No offense to Tony Kornheiser, but if I want to hear your objections to every part of football, I’ll turn on Pardon the Interruption.

Sunday Night also has one feature that completely tips the scales: in weeks 10-15 and week 17, the flexible schedule will be in place, ensuring an exciting and playoff-worthy game every week. This can be seen most recently with the decision to pull the Giants/Bears game on 11/12 to the prime-time slot. This game pits two of the best teams in the NFL against each other and puts in on a national stage. Monday Night Football unfortunately is not blessed in this capacity. They are locked into their schedule. With the flexible schedule, good teams will get showcased and good games will follow. Unpredictable things will happen but the quality of football will be higher.

This season, some of the most exciting games this season have been on Sunday Night Football. The Giants-Colts game at the beginning of the season and the Pats-Colts are some examples. The Monday Night match up the same week as the Pats-Colts game was between Seattle, which is a good team, and Oakland, which is not. Further degrading the play of Seattle was the loss earlier in the season of their quarterback. Profootballtalk.com’s writers stopped writing their blog at halftime in protest. Tonight’s game between the disappointing Panthers and McNabb-less Eagles looks to be not much better.

Even in the non-flexible weeks, Sunday Night Football had interesting and competitive match-ups, while Monday Night Football will feature Oakland twice and there have already been three blowouts this season. And while the Giants and Bears fought it out to the finish, two teams with only mediocre records will played on Monday night. It’s seems that the prominent franchises always get two appearances a year while other decidedly good franchises do not. Favoritism is the name of the game in Monday Night Football.

Finally, Sunday Night Football is the only prime-time game left on one of the three major networks. Thursday Night Football is exclusively on NFL Network and Monday Night will almost certainly be on ESPN for at least a decade. In an age when cable is affordable by large swaths of the population, this does not seem as bad. But it still places one of the most popular American sports on networks that are not accessible by every viewer.

With their flexible schedule and premium placement and time, it’s clear that Sunday Night Football is the best that TV has to offer for true football fans. Are you watching?

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This Article Is Not About Michael Strahan

Last night (November 29) SportsCenter devoted what must have been a three minute-long segment to Michael Strahan and Plaxico Burress. First, let’s agree that a three minute report is a long one. SportsCenter usually reserves time slots of this length for meaningful playoff games or drug/violence-related activity off the field. Thus it would seem logical that the Strahan-Burress story was compelling enough to merit such attention. The way SC presented it, it sure must have seemed to an otherwise uninformed viewer like something worth discussing extensively.

I, however, had already watched parts of Mike and Mad Dog, a New York sports talk radio show that’s broadcasted daily on YES. I’d heard of Mike and Mad Dog before moving to New York. Now that I’ve given them a few listens/watches I can confirm that their interstate popularity is well-deserved. These guys are two of the most logical and level-headed sports commentators around. I’m consistently impressed with them.

It was from these guys that I first heard about the Strahan-Burress story. What actually happened? Strahan, when asked to comment on Burress’s lack of effort on the first Pacman Jones interception in last Sunday’s game, replied that no one should ever give up on a play. It was a very general comment, hard to characterize as instigative. Yet, SC reporter Kelly Naqi chose to present it in a different light, approaching Plax and asking if he had heard about Strahan’s supposedly invective comments. Then, Naqi went back to a surprised Strahan with Plax’s response. To this Strahan predictably reacted angrily, giving Naqi and SC the tantrum-toned sound bites they wanted.

This last part only became clear when I watched the SC segment, because Mike and Mad Dog judged both parties to be in the wrong, conceding that although Strahan should have been more restrained, Naqi unprofessionally and manipulatively incited acrimony where none had previously existed.

The worst part of the SC piece wasn’t that they devoted so much time to it, but that they spun it. They conveniently excluded Strahan’s original quote and failed to provide its exact context. They went straight to the video of Naqi questioning Plax and Strahan. Their presentation implied a purpose to Strahan’s original comments that simply wasn’t there. But once that purpose was accepted as truth by the viewer, then the clip of Plax’s self-proclamation of character, how that’s not his style, how he wouldn’t do that, that he doesn’t call teammates out, etc. seemed logical and served to elevate the level of contentiousness further.

Some may say that this was a big deal regardless, that it was a legitimate story no matter the exact context of Strahan’s quitter comments. Others, like Michael Wilbon in his PTI intro, only 30 minutes before SC aired, might say, “Today was a slow day. What are we going to do?” It was a slow day. And that is the only reason this story was even concocted and given such extensive coverage. The fact is that Plax quits on plays regularly. He’s more concerned with cocking his visor to a precise angle than he is with playing hard. That’s the real story, not the high-school-cafeteria-he-said-she-said periphery that SC covered.

This kind of story is emblematic of what has become of SC. It has become clear that at some point in the past few years there was an executive-level decision to focus SC more on the E (entertainment) than the S (sports) in ESPN. It seems that it has become the policy of the show to neglect genuinely compelling sports stories in favor of anything that could have a cross-over appeal to non-sports fans. Thus the rationale for the aforementioned story: when the audience to which they’re catering is considered, a story about bickering teammates is much more appealing than one about on-field effort.

It was a slow sports day, and instead of a more in-depth analysis of the few basketball games that were played the night before, or a handful of other directions which they might have chosen a few years ago, SC chose to make something out of nothing and effectively create their own news.

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"Your attention, please. . .", by DaSkeeza

I am a sports announcer.

No, you don't know me. I'm not on Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC or ESPN. I'm not on ESPN Radio, or the Jim Rome show, or anything like that. In fact, you've probably never heard my name or noticed me, and if that's the case, I've been doing my job well.

This is my 13th year announcing sports. True, some of it was in college radio, but the majority of it has been as a public address announcer.

So what's that, you ask?

The public address announcer is the voice of your local stadium, arena, rink, or whatever venue you watch sports at. He (or, in the case of the San Francisco Giants, she) welcomes the fans, introduces the starting lineups, reports on essential game information, and reads sponsor messages over the facility's sound system. And, if you happened to leave your lights on in the parking lot, I'll gladly tell you and all your fellow fans of that fact.

If you think about, the perks are great. I get in to games for free. I have access to all the areas the media does (meaning free food and drinks, sometimes). I sit courtside at the scorer's table for basketball, or in the press box for football, soccer, and baseball. Most of the time, I get paid for my services.

But before you think it's all gold, there are some hang-ups. Proving one's worth to those who hold the keys to the high profile gigs is a process similar to that of an aspiring actor. There are games that last forever in front of only a handful of fans, most of which are played while other games you are more interested in are going on. There's the whim of the public relations and marketing staffs, who, for one reason or another, may favor loyalty over talent. And, to cap it off, chances are that when starting out, an announcer will likely have to volunteer his services before being deemed worthy of a paying gig.

And what about that part about doing well if I'm not noticed? Think about all the great games you have seen on television or in person. Do you remember anything the public address announcer said? To be quite honest, if you did, then it probably wasn't that great a game. If I do my job poorly, people will notice and have a hard time focusing on the game itself. If I do too well and people notice, that probably means the fans were focusing on me and not the game.

Yet, it is my belief that even though you may be faceless as a public address announcer, what is said over the sound system has a direct bearing on the way fans experience the game. Over the next couple of months, I hope to let you in on how that process manifests itself through my eyes. I want to share with you all the experiences and revelations that I gather through my announcing work, and perhaps provide you with a perspective that will enhance your approach to the world of sports.

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