Category: sports

It’s not complicated. It’s football.

Rilaly1 Comment

Sports reporters, sports broadcasters, and the sports media, in general, are up in arms. They don’t understand how you, the common NFL fan, can avoid caring about all these stories they’ve created to open your eyes to the true nature of the NFL. After all of the hard work they’ve put in to characterize your favorite players, your favorite team, the commissioner of the league, and the institutional culture surrounding them, you keep watching with your eyes wide shut. You don’t care. It’s the strangest thing.

This may be based on the fact that we don’t care about the NFL. We love the game, we love the games, and the teams and individuals who play those games, but we have disassociated them from the NFL, the league, and the daily soap opera that surrounds it. Perhaps that’s a small price that the NFL has paid for being so huge that some of us can do all of that and love the game, and not feel like we’re contradicting ourselves.

Atlanta Falcons fans wave “Rise Up” flags during an NFL Divisional Playoff game against the Green Bay Packers on January 15, 2011.

Those who have watched, read, and listened to the sports media over the last couple of years have been inundated with NFL stories that will “officially, and unquestionably, begin the ending our enjoyment of the NFL.” When those stories come out, and we don’t abandon the game, the sports media moved onto that next story “that will tick the general public off so much that I don’t see how the NFL survives this without lasting damage to their product.” Even after the members of the media make that proclamation, and the next one, the numbers don’t decrease in the least. We stubborn, fans keep watching the game in record numbers.

The NFL is still the king of all sports. It’s so far ahead of the other professional sports, still, that the competition might need a James Webb Space telescope just to read their corporate strategies, and this is in the wake of three-to-four years of almost nonstop, negative media coverage. What is going on, these sports reporters keep asking. The answer is that the NFL is big, and huge, but not so huge that it affects the daily lives of people watching the sport to the point that they care.

To illustrate this, we need only look at the contrasting conditions that exist in the socially conscious world. In the socially conscious world, socially conscious consumers care. Socially conscious consumers now have websites, blogs, apps, and podcasts devoted to informing them of the latest socially conscious gossip. The socially conscious pay attention, they scour various information resources before making financial decisions, and they punish those who don’t fall in lock step. It’s become a huge business for those “who care” about what they care about, a business that much to the surprise of the socially conscious in the sports media, the common NFL fan takes no part in.

In the socially conscious world, the media are king makers. They can make or break a corporation, or an individual, with a couple lines here and there. With the right story, or an accumulation of stories, the media can drive a corporation out of business. The corporation may try to adjust their practices to fit in with the prevailing winds of our culture, but in the socially conscious world once the damage is done, it’s done.

When socially conscious stories encroach upon the stature of the NFL, it attempts to adjust to the prevailing winds of our culture accordingly, as any other corporation worried about the prospects of their product will. They sit players for infractions large and small, they fine them, and then they blast their socially conscious reactions out into the worldwide media for contrition. Few NFL fans care one way or another. Few of them care about the transgressions in the report. Few care about the contrition. And the confusing simplicity of this is, few care about the NFL. They just want to watch football.

Most common, NFL fans are not socially conscious consumers, and I write that in the most complimentary manner possible. They are mostly male, between the ages of 35-54, making less than 100k a year. They are hard-working people who pay little attention to politics, world affairs, or social issues in general. Opponents may charge that they are head-in-the-sand ostriches, and that may be true in a larger sense, but in a more revealing scope, I think we can surmise that they don’t pick and choose the social issues to care about. They don’t care about any of them. They are one of our most consistent demographics in our country. They tend to their backyards, and they expect you to do the same, whether you are their neighbor or the NFL. They may think a little less of you when you don’t weed and water properly, but that doesn’t mean that the next time you lean over the fence, they’re going to avoid you.

The common NFL fan may know a few of the players’ names. Some of them may know the high draft pick at left tackle, the weak side linebacker that can cover as well as he can tackle, and the 4.2, 40 star cornerback, and everyone knows the quarterback, but for the most part NFL games are won and lost by players whose names they will never know. They’re not as attached to these players as the media believes, in other words. Their kids might be, but they have created enough distance from the players that no one player can ruin the game with their off the field activities. The love of the game is not as in-depth for fans, as it is for reporters. For fans, it’s just football, and it really isn’t all that complicated.

Those in the sports media make the mistake of assigning their own “age of enlightenment” social conscious worldview to their audience. They believe that socially conscious consumers are indicative of the evolved, new earthling, or at the very least that this idea of a socially conscious consumer has made its way to the NFL fan. They’re “wrong”, as Greg Cote says. “All of it.” We love the game of football. We appreciate watching talent at its highest level, but we don’t care about the NFL in a manner that if they don’t handle their controversies better, we’re going to abandon them. We’re not going to boo them when they take the field, depending on the charge, and we’re not going to applaud them when they come back … unless the collective they manage to violate one of our core tenets. 

We tune out when the NFL pregame shows start their broadcast with the latest “weight of the world” drama that has the whole NFL shook up. We don’t want to hear the perspective of this story from all four on-air personalities, and the sideline reporters’ latest quotes from the team’s equipment manager. We also don’t care about the human interest stories that follow these negative stories to inform us that not all NFL players are not as bad as inmate number 6843107347. We don’t care about the good, the bad, or the ugly. We want to watch a game of football, unless the collective they show display some sort of ingratitude for the fan that he or she can feel.

For the devout fans’ desire to learn X’s and O’s analysis, injury reports, and the occasional trash talk, we now have to turn to the internet. We turn to the place that allows us just the facts, or if they don’t, we have the option of only clicking on stories that provide just the facts and figures we want to know more about.

If I were a network programmer, I would experiment with a novel idea, a show called “Just Football!” It would be a jam-packed half hour (22 minutes with commercials) that contained two to three experts talking exclusively about the game. If a player was out, due to some drama, the anchor would say, “(That player) is out for the week!” He would say this with no more drama, and no more depth, than he would with a player that is injured for the week.

“No emotion,” would be the intro to my show’s commercial promo, “No political proselytizing, no jocularity between hosts, and no human interest stories!”

“Just football!” another, more charismatic voice would say to outro.

Word would get those two words out in the common NFL fan community, and the ratings would go through the roof.

We watch the NFL to escape the social studies of our culture. We don’t care if “our guy” is a good guy or a bad guy. We just want to know if he has the talent, and the physical or mental prowess, to get across a line, or to stop the other guy from getting across a line. If he committed a transgression, he should be punished accordingly, but we don’t care about the story, the intricacies of the story, or the social pressure that needs to be exerted to get these people to change. We just want football. It’s not complicated.

We’re not going to stop watching the game because someone did something bad, in other words, and we’re not going to start watching a game because a guy did something good. We’re not socially conscious viewers. If that were the case, we would’ve stopped watching this game long ago, because some of these players use excessive force when they hit one another.

Greg Cote, of the Miami Herald reports about this with some surprise:

“Voraciously, sports reporters and broadcasters keep sounding the first notes of the death knell of professional football. Forebodingly, they warn of the sport’s eroding credibility. Ominously, they say that player wrongdoing and Commissioner Roger Goodell’s missteps and mismanagement have served to fracture the public trust.

“Wrong, all of it.

“It turns out the public hardly cares.”

Greg Cote goes onto report, with an undercurrent of some surprise that NFL fans care about football.

The fan of the game didn’t care about concussion gate. All of the former NFL players –that now have on air personality jobs– preened themselves of the guilt of playing a contact sport by saying that they wouldn’t allow their children to play this violent game. This is now called virtue-signaling, and the anchors saying this were big time stars in their day. Those saying these things were the faces of the game … Pffft! didn’t make a dent.

We didn’t get mad at these former players, however, as we knew that their “look at me” editorials were simply attempts to establish their bona fides as a broadcaster that would help them transition away from being identified solely as a former-player. Those who lasted through the sermon, without flipping the channel, probably didn’t hold it against the former players. They likely didn’t care one way or another.

It also turns out, much to Mr. Cote’s surprise, that:

“Fans don’t need to trust (NFL commissioner Roger) Goodell to love football any more than most Americans need to adore a sitting president to love their country.”

Due to Goddell’s actions over the last couple of years, you would be hard-pressed to find too many common fans who haven’t heard of Roger Goddell, but you would also be just as hard-pressed to find many fans who care about him. I don’t pay attention to such things, but I’m guessing that if you polled NFL fans about the latest press release from the commissioner’s office, you would see figures like .04% see it as a positive for the league, .96% see it as a negative, 4% haven’t heard of it, and 95% don’t care.

Socially conscious consumers care about CEOs. They scour the position papers of these CEOs, and they read the analysis provided by socially conscious writers they trust. They focus a great deal of their attention on the CEO’s gender, race, and flossing habits. Most NFL fans don’t even know Roger’s middle name (Stokoe), because they don’t care. He’s not on the field, he’s not designing a defense, or an offense. He’s not the fan’s friend, or the fan’s enemy. He’s the commissioner of the NFL, equivalent to that fire hydrant on the end of their block. We know it’s there, and we know what it does, but we probably haven’t spent more than one accumulative minute of our lives thinking about it.

Some fans may have a love/hate relationship with Goddell, based on the players he and his commission decides to take off the field, but they’re not going to allow him to influence their enjoyment of the game. When the commissioner does step on the field to do a coin-flip, or whatever a commissioner does during the pregame, we might hear some cheers and some boos, but listen carefully to those boos. Those boos build, as the fans wake out of their pregame slumber. Every pregame ceremony involves three to four names, and 90% of the fans don’t hear the names being mentioned. They only look to the countdown clock that informs them when the game begins. When the booing begins, son turns to dad, dad turns to other fan, until heads around the stadium turn to the scoreboard to try and figure out why everyone’s booing. They join in, they laugh, and it’s fun. He’s an authority figure, and it’s fun to boo authority figures, but no fan of the game cares about him, unless he were to take part in violating the core tenets of the NFL’s core fan. My guess is if the more involved fans didn’t start the booing, the viewing audience at home would hear nothing as this lawyer/bureaucrat walks on the field. 

Greg Cote describes the bad seeds that have littered the headlines as “weeds in the garden, things to be uprooted”. I would go one step further. I would say that they’re checkers. Checkers, as opposed to chess, in that no individual pieces in the game of checkers are irreplaceable. The quarterback could be said to be irreplaceable for a game, or even for a year, but when that quarterback does go down, and his career is deemed over, the devout NFL fan’s focus shifts to the prospect of getting a great prospect in the next draft. That fan may visit that former player’s car dealership, or car wash, in the years that follow. He may even shake that man’s hand and thank him for providing the area’s fans so much joy over the years. For the most part, however, that fan will have already moved on to the next guy, and no member of the media, no commissioner, and “surprisingly” no player can taint that relationship they have with the game. Most of them know this. Most of the players, coaches, and fans know it’s not about them. The only ones confused by the conundrum of why the NFL remains so popular, regardless what they do, are those in the media, and they’re apparently up in arms about it.

[Editorial Update:] We still believe many of the tenets of this article, written on 8/15/2015, but recent evidence suggests this piece requires an asterisk. A complete rewrite is not necessary, in my humble opinion, as we still believe that no player, no matter how moral or immoral, can break the bond the NFL fan has with professional football, but we now add the asterisk that states, “Unless said player, or players, shows a level of ingratitude that the average fan considers a violation of said fan’s core tenets.”  

Most NFL stars have been stars for most of their lives, and they know a level of adoration most sports’ stars never will. These stars might assume that that love is unconditional, and for the most part it is, but as recent evidence suggests there are some principles that NFL fans consider such a staple that even their favorite star cannot violate it.

The average adult fan now knows that NFL stars are never going to be grateful to them for being a fan. The NFL star might pay symbolic homage to the fan, but we know that they take us for granted. We’ve come to accept this as the nature of the beast. As witnesses now know, it is possible to fray the bonds that seal this relationship. This article contains a note that suggests that no player, or players, can damage the bond NFL fans have with the league, but we now know that is not true.  

The media can try to make a dent, and the NFL commissioner can attempt to resolve that issue, and most NFL fans won’t care either way, but if the player shows an unprecedented level of ingratitude, most fans will leave, and some may never come back. We’ve all witnessed those TV’s permanently turned into the “off” position, on Sunday afternoons for a couple years now, even at Thanksgiving, and I don’t know when, or if, they will ever be turned back on. Congratulations, NFL players, you’ve proven me wrong. There is a way to do what I thought couldn’t be done. The otherwise ambivalent and apathetic fan base is now awoke, and they care more than I thought they would about a social issue.    

The Fanatical Fallacies of Football Fans

RilalyLeave a comment

After a lifetime spent watching college football, the only thing I find more disturbing than the disillusioned fan is the idea that I may have been disillusioned for most of my life. Watching college football now, I realize how little I actually know about the game. I may know the history of the game as well as most fans that I encounter; I may know the terminology of the game as well as most of these fans; and I may even surprise some fans by the obscure knowledge I have of some obscure players on some relatively obscure teams. For all of us fans that “know” the game, however, it can feel like a revelation to learn –because most of us have never been involved in the game in any organized capacity— how little we actually know about what goes into the determinations and decisions, made in football meetings, involving those “in the know” coaches of even our favorite teams.

A revelation, by my definition, is a different way of looking at something you’ve been looking at for a long time. Some revelations, such as “Coaches game plan according to the talent they have on the field” can be perceived as so obvious that it may elicit laughter from many quarters, because that’s as obvious as the nose on your face. And I’ve always known that coaches coach according to talent, but when I realized that it answered just about every complaint I’ve ever had about “my team”, I began to complain less and less. When you say that to someone that has been complaining about their coach’s game plan for longer than you’ve been alive, however, they may look at you like that’s as obvious as the nose on your face.

635510731292908219-USATSI-8192511“We have the talent,” is something a fanatical might say, because they know you don’t know “their team” as well as they do. “Trust me, we have the talent.” At this point, you may detect that they think you’re insulting their team, so you clarify:

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t complain, and I’m not saying you have nothing to complain about. I’m saying that most of what you’re complaining about is based on all of the decisions and determinations your coaches, offensive coordinators, and position coaches have made based on what they learn in the spring, and throughout the season, regarding how to game plan according to their team’s strengths, and weaknesses.”

“We have the talent,” he repeated.

When you have a revelation of this sort, you may want to share it, because you may believe that your friend is in an earnest search for truth in the same manner you were, you may think that they’ll chew on your revelation, and reconsider it the next time they think of complaining.  When I presented my revelation to my friend, I didn’t bother to consider that I was treading upon the precarious line that exists between emotion and rational thinking. I didn’t consider that I was doing an injustice to the time-honored past-time of all fans: The art of the complaining.  I basically told him that once you come to grips with the fact that the talent you believe you see on the field is probably not a very good indication of the actual talent those “in the know” know, you’ll begin to understand why the game plan of “your team” is what it is.

The gist of this complaint, as I see it, is that all fans live with the notion that their team’s quarterback (QB) is an as-of-yet, undiscovered John Elway –a player I use as a high water mark of the greatest individual talent the game has ever seen at the position of quarterback, as opposed to the other talented QB’s that happened to fit into their team’s brilliant system perfectly— and the complaint stems from the idea that the only thing holding “our team’s” QB back from recognizing that kind of potential, is the conservative game plan that the coaches decide to implement. The question I had for my friend, and all football fans, is how well do you know the strengths and weaknesses of your team’s QB?  How well do you know, really know, your team’s strengths and weaknesses?  He, like most fans, suggested he knew. He watched them on TV, and he went to their games, and he probably read editorials, and listened to sports radio.

When an offensive coordinator (OC) is first introduced to the potential of a newly recruited QB, he may be led to believe that the sky’s the limit with this kid, and he may develop an explosive game plan that seeks to explore the extent of that QB’s talent on the field. The OC may be as excited as the young QB to employ this explosive game plan, as it will make the OC look as brilliant as the young kid if that kid is capable of executing it. At some point in the spring workouts, and/or throughout the season, the OC begins learn to game plan around the extent of this young man’s ability. It is the OC’s job to not only explore this young man’s talent, and put him in a situation in which he can succeed, but also —and perhaps most importantly— avoid placing him in situations in which he fails too often. At this point, the OC, together with the head coach, and the team’s position coach, may deem it necessary to thin the playbook, or develop a more run-heavy, more conservative game plan.  The latter fact drives most fans crazy, because no head coach, no OC, and no QB coach is going to say, “We had to make that change, because the golden boy that we worked so hard to recruit is not as good as we thought he’d be, or as good as you fans think.”

When my friend’s team’s QB first took the field last year, in 2013, the young man came out of the gate as a highly touted gunslinger. The initial game plan ended up resulting in a shockingly poor interception to touchdown ratio for the young kid. The resultant talk that sprang from that ratio –among fans, and sports radio personalities— involved replacing that QB with the as-of-yet undiscovered abilities of the backup QB.

There’s an old joke that every fan’s favorite player on the field is the backup QB, and the reason for this is that, to some extent, analysts and fans learn the actuality of the starting QB’s abilities, while the extent of the backup’s are still a source of exciting speculation. The fans and analysts know that the backup, much like the starter, was a highly recruited young man that their school happened to land, but they haven’t seen him in practice, they have never attended QB meetings, and they don’t know that young backup QB’s demeanor in the manner the coaches do. When those meetings between the coach, the OC, and the position coaches conclude, and they decide that their best chances at success involve that starting QB, coupled with a new, more conservative game plan, the fans revolt in their little echo chamber, and they come to the conclusion that the coach doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Why did they recruit the backup if they aren’t going to use him? Didn’t they watch the games where the starter threw interceptions all over the place? The head coach, they decide, is just stubborn. He decided to start the starter, and he can’t get out of his way long enough to understand that he needs to do go in a different direction.

Regardless the emotions involved in this situation, I would think that most fans would recognize that every coach, on every level, will do whatever they have to to succeed.  “No, he’s a stubborn, old rooster that always believes he’s right,” they say to this.  Fair enough, I say, but if he were wrong, don’t you think that the OC, and the position coach, would tell him he’s wrong. “They probably do,” the complainer would suggest. “And I’m sure the stubborn, old rooster tells them to go to hell.” You think that this head coach is willing to lose games to prove he’s right? “I sure do. I think he’s willing to go down with the ship. We need a new coach even more than we need a new QB, and that AD (GM if it’s pro) needs to go, and if the owner (pro) doesn’t know that, then we might need a new owner too!”

After listening to my friend gripe about his team’s underutilized golden boy, with a golden arm, he switched the discussion to the manner in which the team audibles at the line. “Everyone in the stadium knows that they’re going to see an off tackle right when the QB audibles out of the called play.” To further my “Coaches game plan according to the talent on the field” belief, I offered my friend a response that I believed to be a helpful, if not humble, insight:

“At one point, in one season, (my team) decided to switch up the snap count, to slow, and presumably throw off the timing, of defensive ends, and blitzing defenders. The only thing they ended up doing, unfortunately, was throwing off their own offensive lineman. The result was an embarrassing amount of false start penalties. The coaches decided that their 18-22 year-old offensive lineman could not keep the switched up snap counts in their 18-22 year-old minds properly, and the coaches were forced to adjust to that by having the QB use more consistent snap counts, silent snaps, and the “slow clap snap” that has been en vogue in college football of late.” My point in introducing that humble analogy to my friend was to prove the point that a game plan has to adjust to the player personnel you have on the field. Rather than acknowledge that larger point, my friend chose to focus on those deficits that I had mentioned with regard to my team.

It’s important to note here that prior to this discussion with my friend, I held his overall intellect in high regard. I wasn’t trying to belittle a person I considered beneath me, in other words, as much as I was trying to move an otherwise silly discussion to a higher level, a level I believed was more true than I knew for most of my life, and a level that I fantasized might place me in a higher level of esteem by my friend. What I found, instead, was that my friend had an unshakable belief, a wall that that he had presumably erected for the purpose of shutting out contrary opinion, and that this wall of was based almost solely on emotion. I’m quite sure that when I repeat this story to another disillusioned fan that they will laugh, and nod, and say they’ve had such a discussion, until that discussion moves to “their team” at which point the cycle will start all over again. When it does, however, I will be armed and ready with Kenny Rogers’ prescient rules of life: “You gotta know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.”

We don’t know what we’re talking about when it comes to the finer points of football, be it college or pro. You don’t know why the coaches made the decisions they made, and I don’t know why. We all think “our guys” are supremely talented individuals who can throw every throw, block every defensive player, and run like the wind. We think this guy should be the starter based on what we’ve seen. We don’t know. We don’t know their weaknesses as well as the coaches, and we don’t know why they’ve coached the players how to compensate for their weaknesses in the manner they do. No coach is going to tell you that, however, as doing so would insult his player. No sports announcer is going to tell you this, because they do not want to insult their audience. Only someone with nothing to gain and nothing to lose would tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about, because if they’re truly paying attention to the finer points of the game, they’re finding out how little they know on a weekly basis. You’ll probably agree with us, because you think you know far more than we do, but by doing so you might be exposing your own ignorance.  

NFL Pregame Shows are Unwatchable

RilalyLeave a comment

It’s possible, as stated in the previous entry on this general topic, that the actual NFL game may never reach un-watchable status, but the various NFL pregame shows already have. They’re a joke, a constant joke after joke, that no one, other than the giggling hosts, find humorous. Overnight ratings for the three primary pregame shows were down an average of 11% in week one of the NFL (2014), and this trend will continue as they continue to move away from the strict commentary and specific analysis of the game to the jibber jabber that I assume is designed to entertain.

The Giggling
The Giggling

Core, NFL fans of a certain age remember a day when Brent Musburger’s NFL Today Show on CBS, ruled the roost in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. This was the standard by which all shows, then and now, are measured. Those of of us who loved this show were irritated by family members who wanted to engage in family matters on Sundays, because they would interrupt our viewing. “But it’s not even game time?” they would say. It wasn’t, but we would tell them that we probably love the NFL today Show more than the games. 

The NFL Today Show was a tight, seamless, and informative production that was deemed by most core, NFL fans to be indispensable Sunday viewing. We all missed a few of their broadcasts of course, but the fact that we remember those instances should cement the value this show once had on our love of the game. The NFL Today show did not just add value to the game, for many of us it was the game. Some of the actual NFL games were boring compared to the production that the NFL Today staff, Irv Cross, the Miss America contestants, and Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder put together, and there was a segment of the American youth that couldn’t get enough of it. As covered in the previous entry on this topic, it is obvious that NFL fan is no longer the primary demographic for the NFL pregame shows.

As the decades passed, some NFL pregame broadcasts decided to capitalize on the fact that we couldn’t get enough of football talk, by giving us another hour. Another hour of nothing but football –and in one cable channel’s case two more hours*– was the premise of the promise. Two more hours of football talk before the fellas could even take the field? What red-blooded American, born and raised on football, would be against that? More is more, and more is always better, right? Plus, when the alternative programming, on Sunday, consists of political talk shows, bowling, fishing shows, and mass for the shut-ins, we should be watching right? What happened instead is that this NFL Junkie has actually decided to spend more time with his family.{1}

The eventual, and perhaps inevitable, conclusion that more is not always more, or better, was soon realized as these productions began adding more to make their show more for the specific intention of attracting more, beyond the core. The core, NFL fan is now showered with the dreaded human interest story, the stories that were once deemed the exclusive right of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres. We are now inundated with stories that inform us that players are people too, and they have all the same hopes, fears, and dreams that we do. We are informed that some of them laugh a lot, and some of them cry. Some of them have sick children, and some of them engage in charitable activities that help out their local communities, and some of them have wives that can teach us twenty-three ways to reuse a banana peel for those NFL families that need to learn how to budget on an average 1.9 million dollar salary.

Once the dreaded human interest stories conclude, the NFL fan returns from the World Fishing Network to hear some football talk, and we hear playful, radio-lite banter that occurs between the bosom buddy hosts. We learn that these ex-jocks that aren’t afraid to provide us with some self-deprecating, zany anecdotes that will lead to further antics and hi-jinx. Some productions then provide segments that force their hosts to have Abbot and Costello-like adversarial relationships with recurring guests and more hi-jinx, with incessant giggling to follow. And if that isn’t enough, we get to see hot chicks tell us about the weather reports for each stadium, and the sideline reports that inevitably lead to more hi-jinx, antics, and banter.

When all these non-football, NFL-themed human interest segments finally conclude, and the NFL fan does receive some actual analysis of the game, they hear these ex-jocks deliver the least controversial, safest opinions they can find. Long gone are the Jimmy “The Greek” no holds barred opinions on a player’s actual ability to perform on a NFL level, and they are replaced by non-critical, safe, and positive opinions by ex-jocks not wanting to hurt a current NFL players’ feelings.

The ex-jocks, and one professional broadcaster, are then required to spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on those teams with a higher fan base. If the Dallas Cowboys fail to make the playoffs this year, it will be the fifth straight year they’ve failed to do so; if the Jets fail to make the playoffs this year, it will be the fourth straight year they’ve failed to do so; but if the Falcons do make the playoffs this year, it will be the fourth time in five years that they’ve made the playoffs. Yet, the ongoing focus of these shows concerns what the Cowboys and the Jets have to do to be competitive again. Dallas is America’s team, and the Jets have the broader market, but they have both sucked for some time now. They suck so bad that talk of them reveals the attempts these NFL pregame shows are making for what they are … unwatchable.

Howard Cosell often spoke of the degradation of his craft with the admission of ex-jocks in the broadcasting booth. That warning surprised me at the time, because I thought ex-jocks could deliver a unique perspective on the game. As the years passed, and I watched these ex-jocks deliver passionate, and well-rehearsed, analyses on the game, I realized that Cosell probably feared what we would all soon realize: just about anyone can do this.

The central character of these NFL pregame shows is often the professional broadcaster on staff, and he or she, often tosses the analysis portion of the segment to the ex-jock who delivers a passionate testimonial that centers around the idea that a quarterback’s job is to throw the ball to receivers, and that those receivers need to catch that ball. The offense will then need to run the ball to keep the defense off balance, and the defense needs to find a way to stop the offense. In the end, the analyst informs us, one team needs to score more points than the other. Anyone can deliver this message, in other words, and the average fans doesn’t care if they do it well, as long as their heroes –the former titans of the gridiron– do it.

Most core, NFL fans thought that extending a pregame broadcast to two-to-three hours would be an incredible plus, and it was … at first. It was, perhaps, inevitable that these broadcasts, and all of the people who know their demographics, would try to find a way to attract more demographics, and keep that audience longer, beyond a “just the facts ma’am” approach of a Bill Belichick to that which we have today. The extra hour(s) led to a need to cover the game in a different way, until it became about the giggling, and the infotainment, and the One Life to Live type segments with a little Oprah-lite commentary to follow. The core, NFL football watching audience that wanted mano y mano analysis proved not enough to fill a two-to-three-hour broadcast. It became redundant, and it led them to try and find ways to expand their show to attract more, beyond the core.

One has to have some sympathy for those who try to put these shows together in the age of the internet, and the thousands of sports talk radio shows that now populate the airwaves, based on the fact that by the time these shows are set to air, on Sunday, every game has been thoroughly analyzed from just about every possible angle anyone can think of, but the human interest/comedy/infotainment segments these pregame shows have developed to fill the time we once couldn’t get enough of, and they are now un-watchable.

*CBS Sports Network’s Other Pregame Show

{1}http://awfulannouncing.com/2014/aa-nfl-pregame-viewing-experiment-part-pregame- show.html