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I have to say I had a pretty good time in Columbia this weekend, despite Ole Miss’ general ineptitude leading to a 34–7 drubbing at the hands of Mizzou. I also enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with one of my professors from grad school days, Marvin Overby, and getting together with Frequent Commenter Alfie and the gang for a Midwestern tailgate and pub crawl.
In other football-related observations:
- Line of the weekend: Brad Nessler, Paul Maguire, and Bob Griese are calling a game on ESPN (Oklahoma–Washington, I think). Maguire sets up Nessler to plug his doing play-by-play on the late MNF double-header game, and this exchange follows:
Maguire: What about me and Bob? We’re not doing anything Monday night.
Nessler: You’re not doing anything now. - Incidentally, that game was worth watching for Bonnie Bernstein alone.
- NBC should have left the “players introduce themselves” video packages with the rotting corpse of ABC Sports where they found them.
- Fox’s NFL graphics package looks a hell of a lot more professional this year than in years past. CBS… not so much.
- The solid ABC bug on ESPN on ABC needs to go away. Now. Before plasma TV owners start calling in death threats to affiliates.
- ESPN needs to give up on trying to hype its “talent” to get people to watch its shows. Telling me that I can hear Colin Cowherd spew his ignorance on ESPNU while I get queasy from the SkyCam (and Cowherd), or trying to dupe me into watching the Sunday night SportsCenter with Stoo-yah Scott by promising more of Chris Berman’s stale act, is not effective promotion of the brand unless I accidentally find another Disney network to watch instead.
- People sitting in a studio don’t need to be using hand-held microphones. Either body-mike them or use a frickin’ boom mike.
Finally, any sports bar that has blown $5k on a widescreen flatscreen television should not be showing a stretched standard-definition broadcast of anything, much less a football game available in high definition. At the very least, switch off the damn stretch mode—am I the only person alive who thinks that exaggerating people’s width by ⅓ is a bad idea?
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4 comments:
I, too, prefer not to stretch out the analog picture. However, I am regularly overruled by my family on that count.
Fox’s NFL football robot thing irritates the heck out of me.
Roughly a year ago my physician referred me to a gastroenterologist; as part of his treatment the gastroenterologist referred me to Methodist hospital here for a gastric emptying study (basically, you eat a radioactive egg, and they put a sensor next to your stomach and take a digital video of the egg slucing out of your stomach). The gastric emptying study requires you to lay absolutely motionless on a bare metal slab for 90 full minutes. As if that wasn’t torture enough (and if you don’t think it’s torture, try it yourself sometime), the technician who conducted the study was listening to ESPN radio the whole time I was there, and as my lack-of-luck would have it, my study was scheduled to coincide with the Colin Cowherd show (which the tech kept his goddam radio tuned to the whole time I was there).
I’ll kill myself before I ever listen to Cowherd again for longer than 15 seconds. Whatta waste of the chemicals that make up his body!
Yeah, the robot thing isn’t all that great… but, it’s always been there.
The Fox graphics last year looked like they were trying to make it as hard as possible to identify what teams were playing by slapping up maybe a third of the team’s logo in the score bar. At least now I can figure out who’s playing at a glance rather than tracking down the latest version of a team’s logo.