The Sorry State of Sports Broadcasting

Sunday night provided the nation with a revelation, and it had nothing to do with the game on the field.

It is true that Joe Flacco completed one of the greatest postseason runs in NFL history, making everyone look a lot longer and a lot harder at just how good the self-proclaimed “elite” quarterback really is. It is also true that Colin Kaepernick almost finished what would have been, by several orders of magnitude, the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history while simultaneously signaling to the league that he just may have a future as more than a fast guy in a gimmicky system.

All of that is true and then some, but for my money the biggest revelation from Sunday was the borderline ineptitude on display from the people CBS pays to be their NFL talking heads, something which underscores the issues many already have with the ever-expanding panel-show approach many networks take to their event coverage.

Granted, the power going out in half of the Superdome during the biggest television event of the year and taking out your “best” broadcasters’ microphones – thereby necessitating 30-plus minutes of stalling from the halftime, pre-, and post-game crew – isn’t exactly something you plan for. It also isn’t the kind of thing that should reduce your on-air talent to incomprehensible puddles.

Ironically, one of the things CBS is often lauded for in its NFL coverage became one of its biggest shortcomings when the lights went out. Since 2006 the network has eschewed having a sideline reporter during their regular season games. Many critics and fans have questioned the necessity of sideline reporters at other networks, and largely CBS has deserved the praise they have received for removing a position that is often as distracting as it is needless, at least from an on-air perspective.

[php snippet=1]

Make no mistake; there are good sideline reporters. There aren’t many, but they do exist, and CBS could have sorely used one on Sunday. Now some will point out that Steve Tasker and Solomon Wilcots were acting as sideline reporters like they have for years during CBS’ playoffs coverage, and that is only partially true. To call those men reporters is being generous. They are both former players with little journalistic training, and both are far more accustomed to acting as color analysts than reporters. These men would be better classified as sideline personalities, or sideline analysts, but not reporters.

Nowhere was an actual, qualified reporter near a CBS camera during a time when the network should have been in full-on investigative mode. They should have found someone from the NFL or someone from Superdome maintenance or both and had them on camera within minutes. They should have had someone receiving and relaying information from qualified sources straight to James Brown’s earpiece. They should have been reporting. As soon as those lights went out they became one of the biggest news stories in the country, if not the biggest.

And not a single person CBS pays to talk to their worldwide audience – outside of a literally powerless Jim Nantz – was qualified in the least to report on it.

There are five men who make up The NFL Today broadcast crew. Those five men were thrust into the national spotlight and asked to improvise for 30 minutes where they knew nothing about the situation they were in and were apparently being told even less. It turns out none of them were even remotely qualified to be in such a position.

All five men are former athletes and coaches without the extensive training broadcasters traditionally endure before reaching a national stage. Even Brown, a man who has been in broadcasting for nearly 30 years and has by and large proven to be talented in front of the camera, graduated with an American Government degree and got into broadcasting a decade after a failed tryout with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. Brown was the most capable broadcaster and reporter CBS had at their disposal Sunday, yet all he could tell the nation was that the lights would be on in 15 minutes, a sentiment he repeated no matter how much time had passed since the last such pronouncement.

This underscores the problem with former coaches and players taking broadcasting and analyst positions, positions they are offered more for their Q score than their actual ability to do the job. Dan Marino is paid a lot of money to contribute essentially nothing to CBS’ game presentation, and even though he brings name recognition it is hard to imagine there are people who are tuning in for Dan Marino who otherwise wouldn’t.

Former players and coaches bring a unique and insightful perspective to sports, and there is definitely a place for them. A show with four of them and one nominal host may be overkill. One makes sense, maybe two if it’s one player and one coach. After that it becomes almost impossible to see the benefit. Is the applicable player experience Marino brings all that different from Boomer Esiason’s or Shannon Sharpe’s? There isn’t even that large of a gap between the eras those men would be classified in. Why do we need all three?

It is easy to see the value in name recognition, but at how many names do you hit diminishing returns? It seems impossible that any of the gentlemen from Football Outsiders would not be infinitely more informative and articulate to the viewing public than Sharpe, especially after the former tight end’s miserable performance during the brownout. The idea that people that haven’t played on the NFL level can’t understand the nuances of the game or break down film is regularly blown to shreds by incredibly intelligent and eloquent people in all forms of media, yet those people are continually passed up, as are traditional reporters, when it comes to the plum television gigs.

Admittedly, this is a bigger issue at CBS, where there is nary a Bob Costas in sight. That Costas, having hosted everything under the sun in a career that has seen him anchor nine Olympic broadcasts, would have had superior grace under fire to that of anyone CBS had in front of a camera has been generally, and I think rightly, assumed by the public.

That’s the problem at CBS and, increasingly, at other networks.

Even at their own networks, talented men like Costas and Chris Mortensen are losing screen time to the likes of Rodney Harrison, Cris Carter, Keyshawn Johnson and Ray Lewis. While those names may bring a certain amount of recognition, is it really worth it for a network to completely eschew talented journalists like Bonnie Bernstein, Lesley Visser or Greg Gumbel? When the lights went out I bet CBS would have traded in Sharpe and Marino to get those three back.

I’m not saying networks need to completely remove former athletes and coaches from their programming, and I’m not saying we need to cut to sideline reporters every time there’s a break in the action. In fact I’d prefer it without sideline reporters.

But just because I don’t want them on the sideline doesn’t mean I don’t want reporters on the broadcast. And that’s the distinction that CBS and others are failing to make.

[php snippet=1]