12/12/04

ESPN Sports Center (ESPN)
PrimeTime Football Eagles at Redskins (ESPN)


ESPN Sports Center (ESPN)

While it’s a simple show with a simple task--talk and show all the sports highlights of the last 24 hours--it is an impressive show. The effort to assemble all the footage, create dialogue, and have two guys speedtalk for 22 minutes must be an outsized one, and this one does it a few times a day.


Prime Time Football Eagles at Redskins (ESPN)

I’m struggling to explain it, but there’s something second-rate about the ESPN commentary team. They fill up the air very well and seem to have a decent rapport, though Paul Maguire doesn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as play-by-play man Mike Patrick and ex-pro Joe Theismann. Maguire, I guess, is “color,” but he strikes me for as a failed high school football coach than a seasoned yakker. Maybe it’s just their voices. All football shows also have to have a woman on the commentary team. She’s invariably on the field getting the inside dope from the locker rooms and sidelines. I don’t know if she or her producer is the one walking around, but I guess she’s on the field because it’s assumed a woman in the broadcast booth isn’t authentic or believable for some reason.

This was a pretty close game. Even though the Eagles seemed in control most of the time (more completions, more first downs), the Redskins were basically matching them. Like my lapse into football-speak? It’s just that the Skins didn’t seem capable of much on offense. The beauty of football is that momentum can change quickly. One impressive play energizes the crowd and seems to make the players run faster and try harder. The Redskins finally put on a good run of plays late in the fourth quarter, and were close to winning, but lost it in the end zone.

An odd thing about football is that just about every game causes some commentator to note that the players are “hitting hard” or something like it. I think Maguire mentioned something about the Redskins bringing their hard-hitting shoes to the game last night. A tortured metaphor, but there is so little fresh to say about oversized men pushing people around.

Listening to the commentators carefully reveals they’re working pretty hard. Often they make mistakes, but since the viewers have been listening in and can see the game, they probably hear what the person is trying to say more than they hear the mistake.