Jay Greeson of the Chattanooga Times Free PressAh, the holidays. Plenty of time with friends and family, and a load of sports on television for all audiences.
Debating between the details of Aunt Edna’s church trip to Jordan or the 12th replay of the Idaho Famous Potato Bowl – and it’s really a lot closer than it should, sorry Aunt Edna – the decisive blow often is the announcing. Good sports broadcasting can be almost as entertaining as the action, and bad sports broadcasting is often worse than the worst game imaginable.
Face it gang, TV’s coverage of live sporting events dictates a great deal about today’s sports world. From the start times to the duration to even some of the match-ups, the TV broadcast is the first thought (that’s what happens when TV is paying that kind of dollars).
Today we’ll trot out our five biggest pet peeves we heard this weekend. Feel free to add your own, and here’s saying if this can create waves, well, like Fred Sanford, let’s enjoy the ripple.
1) “The quarterback position.” As in “Aaron Rodgers is really excelling at the quarterback position.” Uh, guys, do you think the audience may get confused and think Rodgers is excelling at the left tackle position or worse yet excelling at the quarterback supposition or the quarterback corollary? Nothing is worse than being a sports fan and being patronized, and yes we realize that the announcer (or writer) can’t assume that everyone in the audience knows Rodgers is a quarterback. But everyone with an IQ over 60 and a vocabulary with more than 50 words knows that quarterback is a position. Lose the extra words, it just waters down the point. (And yes, we realize the irony of someone who writes this much calling for fewer words, but still.) And that brings us to…