Hold Your Applause

Boy Oh Boise

The Fox approach to sports broadcasting was pretty controversial at one time, but many of the more vicious attacks have faded as viewers have become more familiar with the network (and frankly, as other networks have started to copy the Fox approach). When they began doing NFL games in the 1990s, it was more the raucous pre-game show, set in Los Angeles and not the traditional New York, that attracted most of the complaints. The game telecasts used many of the same folks left unemployed when CBS gave up the NFL, most notably Pat Summerall and John Madden, so there wasn't as much disconnect there, even though the sound effects to punctuate the transition in and out of replays was and remains irritating. The constant display of the score and game time on the screen is widely accepted now, but was objected to by many when it was introduced.

Baseball was a different kettle of fish, possibly because it's a slower paced game to begin with, and its fans are traditionalists almost by rote. The kind of bells and whistles that you'd add to a NFL game aren't a good fit for a baseball telecast, though that didn't stop Fox from trying. It also didn't help from a PR standpoint that the head of Fox Sports was an Australian named David Hill, which added to the apprehension that the network wouldn't show proper appreciation for the subtleties viewers have come to expect.

From a technical standpoint, Fox's work on the NFL and major league baseball (for which it has now been the sole network broadcast outlet for several years) is now clearly up to par; and while not all their announcers are worthy of praise, you can say the same of all the competition too. But starting this year, Fox has the contract for the four season-ending BCS bowl games (aside from the Rose Bowl, which retains its tie with ABC). This was potentially problematic for three reasons. First, while the Fox Sports Channel has an extensive roster of college games in the fall, the national Fox network has none, so they were starting with the most important games of the season, with announcing crews whose familiarity with the teams might be called into question. Second, college football is the most tradition-bound of all major American sports, even more so than baseball, and there would therefore be those who would strongly object any attempts to "Fox up" the telecast. Third, college football fans are, and I say this as one of the breed, some of the most deranged people you'll run across anywhere. Go to a message board for any Division I team, and you'll run across dozens of men--you can sort of tell 98% of them are men--who are positive that all journalists are biased against their school and that the whole world is out to get them generally. Any bobbles on the part of the inexperienced Fox gang would be sure to bring them wrath on a professional level they've never experienced before.

On New Year's night, Fox's experiment with the BCS got under way with the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Az., with a game that at first might not have seemed all that attractive: undefeated but little-known Boise State against traditional national power Oklahoma. However, it turned into an alltime classic, with one of the most exciting finishes of any sporting event in recent memory. The best veteran announcers tend to have a sixth sense about when something special is in progress, but how did the relatively green Fox crew do?

Not too bad, actually. The play-by-play was handled by Thom Brennaman, best known for his work on baseball and for being the son of the longtime Cincinnati Reds radio guy. I thought Brennaman overdid the David v. Goliath stuff--Boise State is, after all, one of the winningnest programs of the last decade--but he sounded surprisingly well informed about the teams, particularly Boise State, a squad that even many hardcore fans had probably not seen play since last year's bowl. As the game advanced towards its unbelievable finish, Brennaman was equal to the moment. The color commentators were Charles Davis, who has done a little work on college football but never with Brennaman; and Barry Alvarez, the former coach at Wisconsin whose snoozy performance during the BCS preview show a few weeks ago raised fears that he was way over his head. But Alvarez's relative reticence, his tendency to speak only when he actually had something to contribute, is a welcome trait in any analyst. And as for Davis, he called that Boise would go for the winning 2-point conversion before they had signaled they were going to in fact do that--I didn't see any way that would happen, but Davis correctly sensed otherwise.

If Fox holds on to the BCS contract for a while, this trio will have the chance to become the de facto voices of college football, even if we're not actually going to see them very often (the Fiesta Bowl crew will also cover next week's national championship game between Ohio State and Florida, to be played on the other side of Phoenix in Glendale). The venerable Keith Jackson, who had tried to retire once before, was exposed as sadly past his prime on the most recent Greatest Game Ever Played, last year's Rose Bowl that decided the national championship. If Monday was any indication, the Brennaman-Alvarez-Davis trio has at least a fighting chance of joining Jackson's company. (And if they fail, there's going to be at least one furious Ohio State fan blogging about it .)

If It's Not A Hit, Won't Be Shocked A Bit

If you read the sports pages, you know that Sunday is the day for the "notes column", little tidbits of news and rumor that individually don't merit a story. So, throwing a few things out there:

* Affiliates of the Fox Network are coming under pressure to not show the O.J. Simpson non-confession confession special that airs next week. Thus far, 9 affiliates have so decided, and I expect that number will swell to the point where it's very possible Fox won't go through with this exercise in horrific taste. My own thinking about this latest O.J. publicity bonanza is that whie obviously done for money, it's not likely to be of major public interest. So Simpson is going to talk about how he "would have" killed his wife and her acquaintance--fine, but most people have already made up their minds on this issue. This isn't Simpson's first book about the killings, and the first one was not a major success even though it came out at a time when memories of the case were more fresh. It's tasteless, but in the end no one has to watch, and I assume not many will. Besides, a major Heroes is due next week.

* It's difficult for anything on television these days to match the ratings that individual shows had even 10 years ago, due to the proliferation of channels. But every so often, you get an event that brings back a mass audience, and Saturday's Ohio State/Michigan game was such an event. The first time these 2 bitter rivals have ever met as the two top-ranked teams was an irresistible hook, and the game received the highest rating for any regular season college football game since Florida State played Notre Dame in 1993, also a #1 vs. #2 game. I can't speak to whether the quality of the telecast was equal to the game itself (though the involvement of Brent Musburger doesn't make me optimistic), because I was actually in attendance. A day like that makes me realize that I'm pretty much just cut out for a life in front of the keyboard at this point. I'm still recovering.

* Speaking of football, I'm not sure how many people realize that coming up Thursday, we will have the "national" telecast of a NFL game that most Americans will not actually be able to see. This isn't similar to the games that have run on basic cable for about 20 years now, since most people have cable and have the channels NFL games have run on thus far (ESPN and TNT). But the NFL Network is carrying games this year on Thursdays, and a good many cable systems do not offer that as part of their basic package yet. Time Warner and Cablevision customers are among those who don't get the NFL Network. A Time Warner spokeswoman locally said that the company doesn't think a NFL-only channel should be part of a basic package, although no one has made such complaints about the Golf Channel. We'll see if this state of affairs changes over the next month, but if the NFL thought putting games on its network would make it irresistible for cable systems, they're in danger of losing that bet.

* This sounds like a terrible idea at first glance, but a couple of the initial reviews have been positive, and the involvement of George Martin makes me want to reserve judgment even further. So we'll see.

The Autumn Of Madden

The NFL seems to be happy with the new national television format which:

1) gives NBC a Sunday night broadcast and designated that as the "premier" game of the week (in contrast to the old ESPN Sunday night games, which clearly had a lesser schedule than ABC's Monday night football);

2) moves Monday night football to ESPN, which has given the network the best ratings in its history;

3) gives NBC the option of juggling the league schedule down the stretch in order to give it more high-profile games on Sunday night. This will first come into play in 2 weeks, when the Giants and Bears meet on November 12.

One thing that doesn't change, though, is the presence of John Madden, who has presumably finished his grand tour of the networks with his current perch at NBC (recapping, he's gone from CBS to Fox to ABC to NBC). For people of a certain age who are accustomed to thinking of Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Don Meredith as the classic Monday night lineup, it still seems surprising somehow to realize that Michaels was on Mondays much longer than Cosell was, and that Michaels and Madden have (after the Dennis Miller idiocy) become a team nearly as venerable as the old Madden/Pat Summerall pair.

But: I have to admit that Madden has never been my cup of tea, exactly. When he first arrived in the booth about 25 years ago, his approach was a breath (or rather a gust) of fresh air. Ex-coaches had not had much exposure on telecasts to that point. Prior to Madden, Summerall's main partner on CBS had been an ex-player named Tom Brookshier, a wiseguy whose analytical skills were weak. But Madden combined a great persona--big guy who loved the game's color and moments of weirdness--with real chops when it came to explaining what was going on.

However, it seemed to me that sometime in the mid-90s, as Summerall got older and fought his well-publicized battle with alcoholism, the Madden shtick started to overshadow the analysis. Moving to ABC helped some, because Michaels is both a solid pro and notoriously prickly about his status as the main man on any telecast. But while Michaels reined Madden in, the greater problem now is that Madden seems to have lost his zest for the job, coming across as somewhat enervated even though NBC has had a pretty entertaining set of games so far. Of course, if I had gotten insanely rich by lending my name to the most popular sports video game in world history, I might be slightly less than fully motivated too.

Frankly, I'm not sure the NFL currently has a signature broadcasting team, though Troy Aikman (somewhat to my surprise) has been pretty good at Fox. At some point later in the year, I'll address the new team at ESPN, where Mike Tirico and Joe (The Thing That Wouldn't Shut Up) Theismann have been joined this year by Tony Kornheiser, in a move from print to the tube that isn't working out quite as well as Ed Sullivan's so far.