In addition to criticizing officials, fans love to mock TV announcers and analysts. Having very little sports media experience (I dabbled with a little sports radio in college and, at one point, co-hosted a weekly Pardon The Interruption-style show called Time Out), I try not to give TV personalities an overly tough time. After all, I'm sure their jobs are harder than they look, and live TV is very unforgiving. That being said, these people are supposed to be professionals, so I expect some reasonable quality standards from them. This is particularly true in football, where announcers have an entire week to prepare for a game and plenty of down time to get their acts together. After that lengthy preamble, let me get to my point - last nights Giants vs. Panthers broadcast on NFL Network was one of the least professional televised sporting events I've ever seen.
Now, I'm not really talking about the quality of the analysis, so I'll cut the broadcast team of Brad Nessler and Mike Mayock some slack even though they a) praised Cam Newton after everything he did, despite the fact that he played pretty terribly and helped put his team in a massive first half whole, b) seemingly went out of their way to continuously note what a great job the officiating crew was doing (they were admittedly solid), as if the league office was demanding that they do so and c) confidently picked the Panthers to win the game during the pre-game show. After all, these things happen, and it's not like I tune in to a Thursday night Giants game to hear what the NFL Network crew has to say. All I ask is that information about the game is presented clearly and accurately. This, sadly, did not come even close to happening.
First of all, I lost track of the graphics errors midway through the second quarter. Luckily, I was texting back and forth with my brother throughout the game, so I have a written record of some of NFL Network's many screwups. At one point during a Giants drive, after New York RB Andre Brown finished a great run, a graphic came up on the bottom of the screen announcing that Mike Tolbert had 1 carry for 16 yards. Not only are Andre Brown and Mike Tolbert not the same person, they're not even on the same team. When the Giants kicked a field goal in the second quarter to go up 20-0, NFL Network went to commercial with the score listed as 17-3. Throughout the broadcast, the announcers would use the yellow pen function to draw on the field - unfortunately, most of the time the broadcast switched camera angles while they were drawing, rendering the arrows and circles they sketched completely incomprehensible and sometimes hilarious.
The mistakes weren't limited to the visuals, however. At one point, Giants TE Bear Pascoe caught a pass, but Nessler claimed that Martellus Bennett made the grab. This mix-up might be understandable if not for the fact that Bennett is black and Pascoe is super-pale; no one who had ever watched the Giants play before could possible confuse these two guys, and the shot of the play was a nice closeup where you couldn't miss Pascoe's bare, white arms. After one of Cam Newton's few decent passes, the announcers praised the nice throw . . . by Eli Manning. Again, Eli Manning and Cam Newton don't often get confused for one another - and after praising Newton the entire game for doing basically nothing, Mayock ironically messed up his name the one time he threw a half-decent ball.
In a game where the halftime report was taken over by a tribute to NFL Films President Steve Sabol, who passed away earlier this week, NFL Network did absolutely nothing to honor his legacy (as my brother accurately, and somewhat hilariously at the time, pointed out via text). As I mentioned earlier this week, I'm not in love with the Thursday Night Football concept in general - I like having games concentrated on Sunday afternoons as much as possible, not to mention the fact that the quick turnaround prevents injured players from healing in time for the game. But if the NFL is going to insist on hosting a mid-week game on its network, they have to improve the quality of the broadcasts. If not for the presence of the HD cameras everywhere (one of which was too close to the field and as a result lacerated Antrel Rolle's knee), I would have thought I was watched a high school game on puclic access.
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