posted under: ESPN, Monday Night Football
Monday Night Now With More Football
Waka waka! Ain't I funny?
Bob Wolfley, who is hit and miss with the Journal Sentinel sports media coverage, nailed it in his Thursday piece on changes ESPN is making to Monday Night Football for this season. The WWL during the off-season held focus groups to find out what people want to see during the weekly primetime game broadcast, and the answer was pretty astounding: football fans want to see a football game. Not celebrity interviews, not a plug for the latest Disney movie, but a competition between two football teams. Imagine that. Wolfley chimes in, “it’s a shame you have to get permission from a focus group to go ahead and call a football game.”
Unfortunately the ESPN suits have interpreted their data to mean viewers want more yakety yak from Ron Jaworski rather than less, but maybe this is a sign we’re starting to move in the right direction. Perhaps in our lifetime we’ll be able to watch a game with a play-by-play man doing play-by-play and a color man adding just a little color and analysis, allowing us to watch the action on the field rather than trying to entertain us with banal talky talk.
A world without Tony Kornheiser in the booth. Imagine it if you can.
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August 30th, 2008 at 2:03 am
I’m OK with Jaws. He knows the game, he studies and breaks down film; he cares passionately about the stuff. The more I see of Kornheiser, though, the more out of his element he looks. (And I swear that Jaws gets these pained, exasperated expressions on his face when Kornheiser veers off into the peripheral aspects of the game when Jaws wants to keep it all X’s and O’s.)
August 31st, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Don’t ever, and I mean EVER, call what Jaws does ‘yakety yak’. The man is the best analyst working and if some TV exec would grow a pair, fire Madden, and team Jaws with Al Michaels, I would be in football-watching Nirvana and could actually stop turning down the TV.
August 31st, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Man crush much?