Monday Night Football

So I watched about half of Monday Night Football last night. If you haven’t heard, after 36 years of being on network TV (ABC) MNF has now moved to ESPN and with the move, brought in a new crew of Mike Tirico, Joe Theismann and Tony Kornheiser. A lot of people were speculating how well the new group get along (compared to Al Michaels and John Madden and other past co-hosts), so I thought I’d share my two cents.
The first thing I noticed when I turned it on, was the minimalistic presentation that ESPN decided to go with. There is a small “globe’ in the bottom middle of the screen that shows the score, quarter, down/yardage and time left. That’s it. The rest of the picture is dedicated to glorious HD football. I really like this approach. It’s simple, elegant and gives full attention to the game in HD.

There were a few things I noticed about the announcing during the game that I didn’t like. First, I feel that 3 is a crowd in the booth while trying to announce any sporting event. There should be one guy who announces the play-by-play, and a secondary player to give insight to the plays or just fill dead space. Whether the sport is football, baseball, soccer or whatever I prefer 2 people announcing. Second, I really like what CBS decided to do this year and get rid of the sideline reporters. There is no need to cut away to someone who is “in the action” to get a better report on what’s going on (and get your women in sports ratio up). If you must, (assuming you stick to my 2 man announce plan) you can cut away to one other remote commentator (like ESPN did with the Bengals game). I really don’t want a party of people commenting on my sporting event. Most of the time I’m going to disagree with your opinion anyway, so just go away.

As far as the “3 men in the booth”, they did a pretty good job. Tirico did an as expected excellent job with the play-by-play (which I’m used to from Thursday Night College Fball) and Kornheiser’s wit didn’t seemed too forced or unnatural. Theismann had some good insite, but seemed to take the whole thing too seriously. He went into a debat with Kornheiser (who was joking) about Bob Newhart’s Bed and Breakfast for like 15 minutes. He needs to ease up and just comment on the plays. In fact, I feel Tony has enough football insight and knowledge that he can comment on the post play annalysis and provide enough humor. In summary, get rid of Theismann (which will never happen since he represents the “football-veteran” view).

For myself, watching the rest of the season, I’m not really a weekly MNF viewer. I’ll watch it if I have nothing else to do, if the Bengals are in or if there is a great matchup on. But if New Orleans is playing the Raiders, I could care less (except now I may watch to try and catch some Reggie action). Plus most of the time better TV is on somewhere else. Like Fox’s 24. Season 5 baby!!!!