“Who can explain? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise never try.” — Lyrics of “Some Enchanted Evening”
Early on in Thursday’s Rams-Bills NFL opener, it became abundantly clear that both NBC and Cris Collinsworth harbor the misconception that viewers were only tuned in to hear Collinsworth’s non-stop, all-knowing, all-seeing genius.
As reader A. Masliansky put it, “If Collinsworth is paid by the word, he is underpaid.”
But with new, wildly illogical salaries for NFL announcers — Collinsworth now getting paid $12.5 million for his seasonal presence — that’s highly unlikely.
Which brings us to Monday night’s Broncos-Seahawks game and the ESPN debut of the Joe Buck-Troy Aikman team, according to Disney’s overwhelming generosity.
After annually trashing his “Monday Night Football” booth with wicked ideas and rotten foresight – Jason Witten, Louis Riddick, Jon Gruden, Joe Tessitore, Brian Griese and the expensive accidental farce of putting Booger McFarland in that horizontally mobile Rubber Baby Booger Buggy – ESPN has turned to Fox’s longtime NFL leadership team, which ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro has called “iconic.”
Maintaining this duo will cost approximately $165 million over the course of their five-year contracts.
As Jimmy Durante said, “Money can’t buy love, money can’t buy happiness, but let me do my own shopping!”
Buck and Aikman jumped to ESPN for what is now known as “Tony Romo Money”. When Romo retired as a quarterback for the Cowboys (the same job as Aikman and, for “MNF” on ABC in 1970, Don Meredith), he was already in the throes of a bidding war to become a network analyst.
He signed with CBS for nearly $180 million over a 10-year period. He has a winning personality, but so do you.
But while everyone but those on TV knows that no game broadcaster can get the public to watch without a game attached, by throwing insane money at Buck and Aikman, they bought and maintained a duo that the public could take or leave.
Although Fox’s No. 1 team has been assigned to the most appealing, higher-rated late-afternoon games, it didn’t matter whether the combination consisted of Buck and Aikman, Jacoby and Meyers, or Null and Void.
But good for Buck, Aikman, ESPN, Disney and maybe first and foremost good for Fox, who, like ESPN, needs no help bringing in rotten temps.
But in this case, it’s highly unlikely that Fox will lose a single viewer due to the absence of its 20-year-old team.
It seems like Buck can’t shake his cultured personality as a grubby piano lounge act feeding his own tip-finder for the show. The pity about it all is that he’s an ordinary man out of the blue, genuinely funny and captivating.
On the air, he tries too hard to be too smooth, a counterproductive transparency that begins with his tired, redundant introduction of Aikman as “the Hall of Famer.”
Buck seems too eager to put his personal stamp on every broadcast, which doesn’t serve him and us well. And his recitation of misapplied and even irrelevant stats in front of him often point to a misunderstanding of football.
Aikman doesn’t seem more relaxed and easy-going than he did when he started out as a somewhat mouth-watering, cliché-ridden public communicator. He has heard that he operates in a gray mist, devoid of insights that he keeps to himself. He is too often just uninteresting, as in ordinary.
To tell us that a player is “playing with a chip on his shoulder” – ugh! — means nothing unless he adds why that chip was formed on the player’s shoulder. Colossally stupid actions, such as penalties for unsportsmanlike behavior in close games, are left gently restrained as in “Not a smart game.”
Both Buck and Aikman apparently have had little to zero expert coaching or advice from Fox, another network that has no day-after expert coaches or advisors.
But who am I to tell Collinsworth, Buck and Aikman that they’re doing it all wrong for the money they’re getting from shotcallers who don’t know right from wrong and bad from worse?
MLB to ‘shift’ rules in the worst way
I’ve never witnessed a season where more batters swing on fields in the sand. What used to seem a rarity – and a hilarity – can now be seen in almost every game, often more than once.
Then there’s Giancarlo Stanton, whose batting average has been eroded — as of Friday, he hit .213, even as analytical fanatics tell us batting averages are no longer significant — as he tries to outdo every pitch he randomly swings. Home run of zilch in every at bat, swinging so hard his body regularly rejects his method.
Never mind, MLB is ready next season to deal with the continued abolition of winning fundamentals through legislation, banning form-of-analysis in the shift to protections to staggered, laptop-based homer-addicted analysis.
Me? I would ban analytics before banning the service. Banning the shift is another form of banning strategy on behalf of those who don’t have the skills or desire to beat it. It’s a capitulation, not a cure.
It reminds me of a friend who told me his son had dropped freshman Spanish in college, and said, “Well, he doesn’t speak Spanish.”
Well, Mr. Roger “Good Investments” Goodell, neither the Jets nor the Giants have sold out their home openers yet.
And both have waived questionable additional ticket purchase fees to attempt to move tickets from their own shared home PSL stadium.
The sudden disappearance of long waiting lists to buy season tickets, pre-PSLs, is long gone, Mr. “It’s all about our fans” Goodell. Greed kills.
Bad Nike dress gets tackled
Always follow the money:
Perhaps the most unintentional comedy of this year’s US Open came when Canadian Bianca Andreescu asked for permission from the chair ump to change her hideous, motion-impeding, smoky, wind-changing, shot-changing outfit into more functional and practical tennis attire.
“It’s not my fault, it’s Nike’s fault,” she pleaded. “This dress is so, so bad. … I have to go. This is really bad.”
The ump told her to, er, just do it.
After the match, which she won, she tried to make Nike nice: “I definitely could have used a different word choice. So I apologize to anyone I disrespected. I love Nike and I hope I can spend the rest of my life with them!”
While Dustin Johnson was quick to grab millions in Saudi mullah moola to leave the PGA, I wonder what would happen to his wife, the former Paulina Gretzky, if she wore one of her revealing outfits in, let we say, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Big Lies, Little Lies: As channel hoppers have pointed out, what the MLB Network’s “Strike Zone” calls “Live Look-Ins” appear on tape delay, with some batters left behind.
It’s come to this: A guy from upstate New York I’ve known and trusted recently read a brochure published by a local high school urging parents and loved ones not to drink or under the influence of their children’s sporting events. to attend drugs. “No guns, please,” is the next.
With NFL Hall of Fame and Notre Dame on the decline, Jerome Bettis is pushing parlay bets — extra bad bets — onto the young and vulnerable in TV ads for a sports betting operation.
It seems that everyone’s first name on WFAN is now Promo Code.
Been watching the Network’s “Live Coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s Death” for the past few days.
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