Re: Coverage of BCS Bowl Games

Gentlemen,

Being that this is the second year of your contracted coverage of the NCAA Football’s BCS Bowl games, I assumed you would have had enough time to get your act together and have everything under control. After the last three games, it appears that this is not the case. To wit, I have some suggestions to make:

1) If the game is listed as starting at 5pm, then it should start at 5pm, not 45 minutes later, after a cavalcade of shitty, pre-produced puff pieces and pointless pontification by past their prime commentators. 5pm means 5pm, dammit!

2) Please have your play-by-play and color guys learn about both the teams playing. Do your research. At least have them learn about this past year in college football, for chrissake! Listening to these guys, it’s like they’ve never seen the game before. They’re calling over to the official’s booth in the middle of the game, asking for explanations as to whether or not this “forward pass” is a legal part of the game. It’s embarrassing.

3) On that note, get some guys in the booth that actually enjoy each other’s company. We’re only two games into this year’s BCS and these guys have been at each other’s throats time and time again and generally don’t seem to like each other. I’ve heard the booth nearly erupt into fisticuffs at least four or five times a game. While a fight between two men who can barely talk and watch a sporting event at the same time sounds funny, my guess is it would be more depressing than anything else.

4) I watch a lot of college football. I know how long a college football game usually takes, what with stoppages for commercials and whatnot. A little over three hours, tops. Not four and a half hours to five hours. This is in no small part because you have sponsorships for every little thing that happens in the game, from the stats to the first down marker to the ever-loving turf. You’re already running more advertising than I’ve ever seen for a sporting event, why is this necessary? What is all this advertising paying for? Because it’s not like you hired top-notch talent to cover the game, or invested in fancy graphics or built an animatronic Keith Jackson.

5) Don’t insult my intelligence. I know that I’m watching FOX. You don’t need have your announcing crew go out of their way to allude to shows that also happen to air this network. The next time I hear Thom Brenneman trying to connect Prison Break with a wide receiver screen, I’m going to find you and bop you in the nose. Oh yeah, and I’m also aware that FOX owns a movie studio, and that movie studio happens to put out feature films from time to time, like, perhaps a film called “Jumper.” I got it, you like to tie your programming in with other programming. Very clever.

6) No one has cared about marching bands (Grambling, Southern and Florida A&M aside) since 1950. Please find someone to talk mindlessly about the first half, instead. All this tells me is that your crew needed a piss-break and a cigarette and that I need to find something worthwhile to do with the 20 minutes in-between halves.

Look, let’s be honest. We all know that you are basically the KMart of sports coverage. As cheesy as ESPN can be, they make you guys look like a high school newspaper. It’s sad, really. Let’s just get through the next few years in relative peace and we can forget that this ever happened.