Announcers must let games do talking

Phil Mushnick

EQUAL TIME

If we were to conclude the greatest commercial invention is the snow globe, how well would they sell if their exclusive manufacturers decided to paint their outsides, so, no matter how hard you shook them, you couldn’t see in?

I apologize, but it’s tough to come up with an analogy that captures the ridiculous dirt that TV has done to football. Networks now spend billions for rights, then do everything they can, including copying other networks’ worst ideas, to wreck the telecasts.

Sports TV people simply won’t allow TV to be TV. They commit lunacide, trying to make TV everything else — everything less.

AP

DID YOU HEAR? While Earl Mitchell and the Texans’ defense beat up on Andy Dalton and the Bengals, NBC announcers wouldn’t stop talking, says Phil Mushnick.

Starting with FOX’s Friday Cotton Bowl, through Saturday’s Bengals-Texans playoff game on NBC, one could have watched — tried to watch — nearly eight consecutive hours of football and been left with the inescapable sense that not even one play — an incomplete pass, a 2-yard run — spoke for itself. FOX’s Charles Davis made a speech after every play, then NBC’s Mike Mayock did the same.

And beyond the endless, often contradictory filibusters, both telecasts applied artificial visual distractions to shed more darkness on the subject.

Mayock was particularly aggravating, making a long story out of every short and self-evident one. He would over-analyze a corn muffin. He so carefully avoids the short, simple and sensible it’s as if he’s paid by the syllable. Defenders don’t jump to knock down passes, they “elevate.”

Rather than say nothing, he would throw in that someone has “to try to make a play, here.” Is there a time when someone doesn’t?

A significant late hit call on Texans DE Antonio Smith went ignored so Mayock could swoon over two replays of Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton stepping away from pressure to complete a short pass — a standard act (after all, I played intramural football) that nonetheless inspired more awe in Mayock than in Dorothy when she first saw the Emerald City.

Did Mayock expect Dalton, a righty, to take the sack when there was space to his right?

In a close game, Cincinnati had third-and-half-a-yard from its own 17 when Mayock said: “If you want to take a shot, here, Andy Dalton, you can.” Of course he could, but why in the name of Joe Pisarcik would he?

The telecast became so smothered in gaseous wind that play-by-player Tom Hammond, generally a reliable nuts-and-bolts guy, got lost. As NBC showed a Texans player preparing to field a punt and the Bengals in punt formation, Hammond declared: “And on fourth-and-3, Cincinnati will go for it.”