Somewhere out in the grand old United States of America there must be millions of people who enjoy — maybe even love — the sound of incessantly chattering commentators on televised sporting events.
How else do you explain the ubiquitous, growing, all-encompassing presence of this noise?
It’s either something a lot of people really want or the powers that be in TV land must strongly believe they need this audio accompaniment, regardless of whether viewers want it.
It drives me crazy. And this isn’t some geezer thing. I have long been annoyed by the intrusions on my sports watching by over-talking broadcasters. I see them as one of life’s little inexplicable aggravations, like tailgaters or litterers or religious zealots.
Play-by-play and “color” contributions for sportscasts should be limited to the bare necessities — information to provide background on or better explain the action, which we are seeing for ourselves.
The subject of the broadcast is the game itself not the people providing the telecast. The problem arises when broadcasters feel they are an important part of the entertainment value of the event. They are not. And I resent it when they present themselves as such, when two or three people keep talking and interject tales or information or opinions extraneous to the game in front of them.
It’s as if a portion of their pay is docked if more than two seconds passes without someone speaking.
Some exemplars of nice, restrained-but-informative style were the likes of Jon Miller/Joe Morgan on ESPN baseball, Gary Thorne/Barry Melrose on ESPN college hockey and Joe Buck/Hank Stram on NFL national radio coverage of the 80s.
While I’ve came to accept chatty broadcasters as a necessary evil, I gladly welcomed the arrival of remote controls with the almighty mute button, augmenting the one for simply turning down the volume.
In 1980, one TV network actually responded to criticism of broadcasters by featuring a football game without any. I thought it was a glorious thing — just a game, with the crowd noise and other auditory aspects one experiences from being there in person.
Here’s the Wikkpedia entry on the event:
“The Announcerless Game was an American football contest played on December 20, 1980, between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League. As an experiment, the NBC television network broadcast it without assigning any commentators to cover it.
“The two teams were playing the last game of that season for them as neither had qualified for the playoffs, and since the game was being broadcast nationally NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer decided on the idea to boost what would otherwise have been weak ratings. The Jets won a 24–17 upset victory.
“To replace the announcers, the network used more graphics than usual and asked the public address announcer at Miami's Orange Bowl to impart more information than he typically did. Efforts to use more sensitive microphones and pick up more sound from the field, however, did not succeed. While the experiment did increase the telecast's ratings, it was widely regarded as a failure since it did not provide sufficient context for viewers. No network broadcasting any major North American professional team sport has ever tried it again, except through alternate feeds of games offered with announcers.”
Yes, the reaction of the broadcasting establishment was predictably protective of their employees and programming.
Conintues Wikepedia:
“Reaction was mixed, ranging from "good-natured humor to applause to some surprising anger," as Bryant Gumbel would later put it on air shortly before the telecast started.
" ‘My first reaction was of incredible nerve, nervousness,’ Dick Enberg, one of the NBC announcers, recalled to ESPN 30 years later. ‘We all gathered together, hoping that Ohlmeyer was dead wrong ... What if this crazy idea really worked?’
“As Ohlemyer had hoped, the telecast drew higher ratings than it probably otherwise would have. ‘It was a dog of a game,’ he recalled to ESPN. ‘It did much better for than [it should have].
“Writing two days later, Chicago Tribune television columnist David Israel agreed: ‘People talked about a game they would otherwise have ignored.’ Of the approximately one thousand phone calls to the NBC switchboard, the network reported later, about 60 percent were supportive of the decision to go without announcers.
Gumbel discounts the importance of that reaction, noting that a thousand callers is not statistically significant when set against the U.S. population of 200 million at that time.
" ‘I thought it was more amusing than anything else,’ he said later. I viewed it as kind of a stunt with a small 's.'"
I personally would give more weight to that 60 percent supportive figure. I think most people would welcome less talk and more plain video display of games.
But the sports establishment has had the opposite reaction.
A third person has been added to most national baseball broadcasts, with a fourth roaming the stands. Televised NFL, college football and college basketball contests have retained basic two-person teams but sideline reporters are omnipresent and each play is given instant, chatty analysis.
The long-time personification of obnoxious commentary has been ESPN’s basketball expert Dick Vitale. Judging from various accounts, he’s annoyed as many viewers as he’s pleased over the decades.
But, again, the reaction among his contemporaries has been to embrace his style rather than accommodate those who hate it.
Prime examples are Doris Burke on professional and college basketball telecasts and Kirk Herbstreit for college football games.
Burke, whom I have praised for her knowledge and skills in a prior post, has taken the Vitale approach of instant commentary following every possession on the court, often running over the next basket in her eagerness to unleash all her opinions and observations on the previous one (or some other subject).
Likewise, Herbstreit cannot stop blurting out analyses within milliseconds after the play-by-play announcer has quickly recounted the action.
Both Burke and Herbstreit obviously know their subject matter but neither respects viewers enough to just let game action flow by itself, open to all of our own reactions and observations.
And, as is the case with all journalism, this rush-to-react style often leads to inaccurate or misleading statements. Getting to the truth of any situation takes time, perspective and work.
One recent example was Herbstreit’s instant conclusion after Alabama’s turning-point decision to attempt an onside kick in the fourth quarter of the Jan.11 national title game against Clemson.
According to a YouTube clip of the action (I didn’t watch it live), Herbstreit said Alabama’s decision stemmed from an observation in its coaching booth that Clemson front-line defenders were crowding forward toward the kicker — something he had noticed — and thus would be susceptible to a pooch kick over their heads.
Wrong.
Sports Illustrated’s report on the game found that the Alabama coaches actually had seen on film that Clemson’s defenders “squeezed to one side of the field” on kickoffs when they “expected the ball to be booted deep into the corner.”
“When Clemson lined up that way several times on Monday, (Coach Nick) Saban knew the pop kick would work . . . ,“ the magazine reported.
So, rather than wait for a post-game account of the particulars surrounding the onside kick, compulsive talker Herbstreit immediately offered his own, quick, uninformed statement, leading listeners to believe he and Alabama coaches shared an observation that led to the bold decision.
He and others like him — particularly the trios assigned in recent years to ESPN’s baseball broadcasts — are just bursting to tell us all this incredible stuff they’ve got in their heads or game-preparation sheets.
I just want to tell them, “Slow down, please, and let us enjoy the game. Show some restraint. Less is more. There will be plenty of time and opportunities for us to eventually find out the stories behind the action.”
In addition to producing inaccurate information, mega-blabbering also often generates instant attempts at event analysis rather than concentrating on the hear-and-now and letting matters settle so informed scrutiny can be undertaken, as was the tradition in the good ole days, in the hours or days afterward.
This is what happened in the second half of Monday night’s broadcast of a women’s college basketball game between Notre Dame and Tennessee.
As the Irish built a 25-point lead early in the final quarter, Burke began a thorough critique of the Volunteer team and its program. Meanwhile, the team itself was demonstrating the exact opposite of the problems she was citing — hustling, hitting shots, disrupting Notre Dame and battling with a never-say-die spirit that cut the deficit to an approachable 12 or 13 points with a few minutes left.
Burke and play-by-play person Dave O’Brien gave it a “too little, too late” spin but the reality was their rush to judgment overplayed Tennessee”s troubles and missed a key part of the game’s drama — Notre Dame was forced to reinsert some starters to stem the rally — not to mention a major flaw in the Irish’s game this season: weak fourth quarters.
This over-broadcasting of sports events is part of the over-important role that TV has assumed in the entire sports arena.
With the millions of dollars being poured into sports by the broadcast networks, they control when and how games are played.
To fill programming needs, we get college and professional football games mid-week instead of Saturdays (college) or Sundays (pros). We have media timeouts for football and basketball games, directly impacting the flow of action and ability to strategize during stoppages in play. We get baseball postseason contests played at night in chilly temperatures and continuing well past the bedtime of (at least) children, working parents and seniors.
And TV’s interest (read: cash influx) is largely to blame for turning college football into an NFL minor league system, taking away much of the storied, campus-centered traditional bowl format and expanding some schedules to 13 or 14 games (see blog post of March 23, 2012, “Good, old college football”).
From all of that, television personnel evidently started feeling pretty darn important in the whole sports scheme of things. Hence, they treat their broadcasting of events as being equally part of their appeal to viewers — that people are tuning in to games as much to hear what the telecasting personnel have to say as they are to watch what is actually taking place.
They’re dead wrong, I believe.
But I have to go back to my opening conclusion:
Somewhere out in the grand old United States of America there must be millions of people who enjoy — maybe even love — the sound of incessantly chattering commentators for televised sporting events.
To put it nicer, a whole lot of people must actually tune in to hear what Vitale, Herbstreit, Burke, Chris Collinsworth, Phil Sims, Bob Costas, John Kruk, Aaron Boone, Al Michaels, etc., have to say about a contest.
For me, that just means wearing out the mute button.
How else do you explain the ubiquitous, growing, all-encompassing presence of this noise?
It’s either something a lot of people really want or the powers that be in TV land must strongly believe they need this audio accompaniment, regardless of whether viewers want it.
It drives me crazy. And this isn’t some geezer thing. I have long been annoyed by the intrusions on my sports watching by over-talking broadcasters. I see them as one of life’s little inexplicable aggravations, like tailgaters or litterers or religious zealots.
Play-by-play and “color” contributions for sportscasts should be limited to the bare necessities — information to provide background on or better explain the action, which we are seeing for ourselves.
The subject of the broadcast is the game itself not the people providing the telecast. The problem arises when broadcasters feel they are an important part of the entertainment value of the event. They are not. And I resent it when they present themselves as such, when two or three people keep talking and interject tales or information or opinions extraneous to the game in front of them.
It’s as if a portion of their pay is docked if more than two seconds passes without someone speaking.
Some exemplars of nice, restrained-but-informative style were the likes of Jon Miller/Joe Morgan on ESPN baseball, Gary Thorne/Barry Melrose on ESPN college hockey and Joe Buck/Hank Stram on NFL national radio coverage of the 80s.
While I’ve came to accept chatty broadcasters as a necessary evil, I gladly welcomed the arrival of remote controls with the almighty mute button, augmenting the one for simply turning down the volume.
In 1980, one TV network actually responded to criticism of broadcasters by featuring a football game without any. I thought it was a glorious thing — just a game, with the crowd noise and other auditory aspects one experiences from being there in person.
Here’s the Wikkpedia entry on the event:
“The Announcerless Game was an American football contest played on December 20, 1980, between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League. As an experiment, the NBC television network broadcast it without assigning any commentators to cover it.
“The two teams were playing the last game of that season for them as neither had qualified for the playoffs, and since the game was being broadcast nationally NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer decided on the idea to boost what would otherwise have been weak ratings. The Jets won a 24–17 upset victory.
“To replace the announcers, the network used more graphics than usual and asked the public address announcer at Miami's Orange Bowl to impart more information than he typically did. Efforts to use more sensitive microphones and pick up more sound from the field, however, did not succeed. While the experiment did increase the telecast's ratings, it was widely regarded as a failure since it did not provide sufficient context for viewers. No network broadcasting any major North American professional team sport has ever tried it again, except through alternate feeds of games offered with announcers.”
Yes, the reaction of the broadcasting establishment was predictably protective of their employees and programming.
Conintues Wikepedia:
“Reaction was mixed, ranging from "good-natured humor to applause to some surprising anger," as Bryant Gumbel would later put it on air shortly before the telecast started.
" ‘My first reaction was of incredible nerve, nervousness,’ Dick Enberg, one of the NBC announcers, recalled to ESPN 30 years later. ‘We all gathered together, hoping that Ohlmeyer was dead wrong ... What if this crazy idea really worked?’
“As Ohlemyer had hoped, the telecast drew higher ratings than it probably otherwise would have. ‘It was a dog of a game,’ he recalled to ESPN. ‘It did much better for than [it should have].
“Writing two days later, Chicago Tribune television columnist David Israel agreed: ‘People talked about a game they would otherwise have ignored.’ Of the approximately one thousand phone calls to the NBC switchboard, the network reported later, about 60 percent were supportive of the decision to go without announcers.
Gumbel discounts the importance of that reaction, noting that a thousand callers is not statistically significant when set against the U.S. population of 200 million at that time.
" ‘I thought it was more amusing than anything else,’ he said later. I viewed it as kind of a stunt with a small 's.'"
I personally would give more weight to that 60 percent supportive figure. I think most people would welcome less talk and more plain video display of games.
But the sports establishment has had the opposite reaction.
A third person has been added to most national baseball broadcasts, with a fourth roaming the stands. Televised NFL, college football and college basketball contests have retained basic two-person teams but sideline reporters are omnipresent and each play is given instant, chatty analysis.
The long-time personification of obnoxious commentary has been ESPN’s basketball expert Dick Vitale. Judging from various accounts, he’s annoyed as many viewers as he’s pleased over the decades.
But, again, the reaction among his contemporaries has been to embrace his style rather than accommodate those who hate it.
Prime examples are Doris Burke on professional and college basketball telecasts and Kirk Herbstreit for college football games.
Burke, whom I have praised for her knowledge and skills in a prior post, has taken the Vitale approach of instant commentary following every possession on the court, often running over the next basket in her eagerness to unleash all her opinions and observations on the previous one (or some other subject).
Likewise, Herbstreit cannot stop blurting out analyses within milliseconds after the play-by-play announcer has quickly recounted the action.
Both Burke and Herbstreit obviously know their subject matter but neither respects viewers enough to just let game action flow by itself, open to all of our own reactions and observations.
And, as is the case with all journalism, this rush-to-react style often leads to inaccurate or misleading statements. Getting to the truth of any situation takes time, perspective and work.
One recent example was Herbstreit’s instant conclusion after Alabama’s turning-point decision to attempt an onside kick in the fourth quarter of the Jan.11 national title game against Clemson.
According to a YouTube clip of the action (I didn’t watch it live), Herbstreit said Alabama’s decision stemmed from an observation in its coaching booth that Clemson front-line defenders were crowding forward toward the kicker — something he had noticed — and thus would be susceptible to a pooch kick over their heads.
Wrong.
Sports Illustrated’s report on the game found that the Alabama coaches actually had seen on film that Clemson’s defenders “squeezed to one side of the field” on kickoffs when they “expected the ball to be booted deep into the corner.”
“When Clemson lined up that way several times on Monday, (Coach Nick) Saban knew the pop kick would work . . . ,“ the magazine reported.
So, rather than wait for a post-game account of the particulars surrounding the onside kick, compulsive talker Herbstreit immediately offered his own, quick, uninformed statement, leading listeners to believe he and Alabama coaches shared an observation that led to the bold decision.
He and others like him — particularly the trios assigned in recent years to ESPN’s baseball broadcasts — are just bursting to tell us all this incredible stuff they’ve got in their heads or game-preparation sheets.
I just want to tell them, “Slow down, please, and let us enjoy the game. Show some restraint. Less is more. There will be plenty of time and opportunities for us to eventually find out the stories behind the action.”
In addition to producing inaccurate information, mega-blabbering also often generates instant attempts at event analysis rather than concentrating on the hear-and-now and letting matters settle so informed scrutiny can be undertaken, as was the tradition in the good ole days, in the hours or days afterward.
This is what happened in the second half of Monday night’s broadcast of a women’s college basketball game between Notre Dame and Tennessee.
As the Irish built a 25-point lead early in the final quarter, Burke began a thorough critique of the Volunteer team and its program. Meanwhile, the team itself was demonstrating the exact opposite of the problems she was citing — hustling, hitting shots, disrupting Notre Dame and battling with a never-say-die spirit that cut the deficit to an approachable 12 or 13 points with a few minutes left.
Burke and play-by-play person Dave O’Brien gave it a “too little, too late” spin but the reality was their rush to judgment overplayed Tennessee”s troubles and missed a key part of the game’s drama — Notre Dame was forced to reinsert some starters to stem the rally — not to mention a major flaw in the Irish’s game this season: weak fourth quarters.
This over-broadcasting of sports events is part of the over-important role that TV has assumed in the entire sports arena.
With the millions of dollars being poured into sports by the broadcast networks, they control when and how games are played.
To fill programming needs, we get college and professional football games mid-week instead of Saturdays (college) or Sundays (pros). We have media timeouts for football and basketball games, directly impacting the flow of action and ability to strategize during stoppages in play. We get baseball postseason contests played at night in chilly temperatures and continuing well past the bedtime of (at least) children, working parents and seniors.
And TV’s interest (read: cash influx) is largely to blame for turning college football into an NFL minor league system, taking away much of the storied, campus-centered traditional bowl format and expanding some schedules to 13 or 14 games (see blog post of March 23, 2012, “Good, old college football”).
From all of that, television personnel evidently started feeling pretty darn important in the whole sports scheme of things. Hence, they treat their broadcasting of events as being equally part of their appeal to viewers — that people are tuning in to games as much to hear what the telecasting personnel have to say as they are to watch what is actually taking place.
They’re dead wrong, I believe.
But I have to go back to my opening conclusion:
Somewhere out in the grand old United States of America there must be millions of people who enjoy — maybe even love — the sound of incessantly chattering commentators for televised sporting events.
To put it nicer, a whole lot of people must actually tune in to hear what Vitale, Herbstreit, Burke, Chris Collinsworth, Phil Sims, Bob Costas, John Kruk, Aaron Boone, Al Michaels, etc., have to say about a contest.
For me, that just means wearing out the mute button.