2007 NFL on TV Review

By Jim Bevs

Well, that dark day is upon us.  The Super Bowl is history, and only the Pro Bowl (stifling laughter) remains on the schedule for the 2007 season.  We’ll all have to settle now for trolling the internet for free agency and draft news, doing research for March Madness and Fantasy Baseball leagues, and, most daunting of all, reintroducing ourselves to our loved ones.

I’m not quite ready to make that leap quite yet.  The detritus of a season’s worth of pigskin-watching still rattles about my brain, so I thought I’d do some house-cleaning with some observations about what the NFL on TV looked like in 2007, what it got right, and, of course, what it got wrong.  The Super Bowl ratings might suggest an ain’t-broke-so-leave-it-be approach, but I’m here to tell you that the league’s television popularity sometimes rises in inverse proportion to the performance of the networks and broadcasters putting on the show.  Let’s look back and see how.

-The Super Bowl broadcast itself was solid.  Joe Buck thankfully pulled back his stand-up comedy aspirations for a day, and Troy Aikman was candid enough to atone somewhat for his blatant homering for the Cowboys in their brief playoff stay.

The pre-game show was another story.  I understand that sports and entertainment are more closely entwined than ever before, but at times I forgot that I was watching a lead-up to a football game.  Having Ryan Seacrest do the whole red-carpet thing might have seemed inspired, since Fox is under the impression that viewers will go into convulsions if they don’t see him once every 15 minutes.  And the randomness of the celebrities was unintentionally amusing, especially as Seacrest groped for some sort of football connection.  (“So, Laurence Fishburne, you mentored Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.  Eli Manning has that same stoned look on his face all the time.  What would you tell him before the big game?”)

But anyone looking for a hardcore discussion of the game was better off elsewhere.  Even the entertaining Fox pregame crew was pushed to the background, with the exception of their tired interchanges with Frank Caliendo (that 15 minutes has to be up soon, doesn’t it?)

Look, nobody expects a hard-core dissection of game film for four hours straight.  Leave some time for some musical performances to please the dilettantes if you want, but please throw a bone to those faithful fans who’ve been watching all year long.

-Speaking of game analysis, did anyone catch Cris Collinsworth on Inside The NFL in the week before the game discussing how he would go about shutting down Tom Brady and the Pats offense?  His three suggestions (rush more than 4 people, force Randy Moss to the inside, and get up on the other receivers to slow the screens) were followed almost to the letter by the Giants in their upset.  Someone please get this guy a regular gig calling games before someone scoops him up as a defensive coordinator.

-Also on Inside The NFL, Brian Billick was eloquent, cerebral, and detailed in his analysis.  He might not be a thrill-a-minute, but he’d be a great addition to somebody’s television roster for however long he stays out of the coaching racket.

-Fox’s reliance on the “Well, he’s a big guy, so he must be colorful” approach to hiring announcers stopped making sense a long time ago.  John Madden was the blueprint, bringing a regular-guy approach that made you forget how knowledgeable he was.  But then Fox tried the same approach with former players, to diminishing results (Matt Millen, Bill Maas, Brian Baldinger.)  The absolute nadir of this trend though is Tony Siragusa, whom, lacking better ideas, Fox shoved on the sideline with the apparent instructions to interrupt the broadcast at any point, regardless if someone else was talking.  This train wreck of a set-up has derailed any possible improvement by Moose Johnston as a color commentator and could only be enjoyable if Siragusa takes an errant pass in the gut or something.

-Other than Keyshawn Johnson, who showed the willingness to do some homework rather than just rely on personality, the latest crop of ex-players to enter the studio-show business has been shaky at best.  Granted, the overcrowding of these shows makes it darn near impossible for anyone to get a word in edgewise, but guys like Emmitt Smith, Tiki Barber, and Jerome Bettis truly seem lost.  Smith is nervous all the time, and Barber wants to sound erudite but instead comes off as pompous.  Bettis just seems to smile a lot and only seems happy discussing the Steelers.  His old coach Bill Cowher suffered from the same reluctance to criticize his old buddies that so many other ex-coaches have shown in the past.

Memo to Michael Strahan:  Before you make that retirement decision, watch a few tapes of these guys closely.  The grass is not always greener in the studio.

-After two years, I’m beginning to think that the Tony Kornheiser experiment has failed on Monday Night Football.  I thought that Year One could be written off to the disharmony of Kornheiser and Joe Theismann, although at least that situation held the hope that Theismann would completely snap on the air after one of Kornheiser’s wise cracks.

But getting Ron Jaworski didn’t help.  No one knows the game better, but Jaws ended up trying to help out Kornheiser by laughing way too much at his so-so material, all while attempting to squeeze in some useful analysis.  I’ve said this before, but if ESPN insists on going the non-football expert route in the booth, they would be better off just having Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon rehash their PTI act.  The chemistry is already there, and you’ve got two guys approaching the game at the same level.  Short of that, just give Jaws the gig and let him fly solo.

-Have you ever seen the first Austin Powers movie, where Austin comes out of cryogenics and has trouble controlling the volume of his voice?  Watch Jamie Dukes on the NFL Network, and you’ll have a flashback to that scene.

-While Madden tends to belabor points way too often these days, and Al Michaels is way too fawning over Madden, they still represent a solid duo that don’t overdo anything.  More important, the Sunday Night schedule gives them premiere games every week, especially with the flex scheduling.  So if there are flaws, the quality of the game makes them easy to overlook.

And that last statement pretty much says it all for the folks mentioned above.  Maybe you’re only as good as the game you’re calling.

Jim Bevs is the NFL media writer for KnowHuddle.com. He can be contacted directly by email at jimb@knowhuddle.com.