Sunday, September 16, 2012

NASCAR fans Know The Feeling: CBS Ripped On Football Broadcast

NASCAR fans have going through this for many years, but now, the incompetency bug has hit NFL football broadcasts.
From the Baltimore Sun: After nine months away from Greg Gumbel and Dan Dierdorf, I forgot how maddening it was to watch the second-string unit from CBS Sports try to telecast a Ravens game.
Players misidentified, random images inexplicably popping up on the screen, key injuries missed or ignored, and announcers sticking to pre-game story lines long after they should have abandoned based on what was actually happening on the field. These are a few of my least favorite things when watching TV football.
And CBS Sports committed all these sins and more Sunday as the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Ravens  on Michael Vick's game-long grit and final-minutes execution.
As if the loss wasn't enough to bear in its own right, I had to watch a telecast of it that was almost as incompetent as the officiating. But I don't review officials, only the folks bringing it to us on TV, and they were plenty bad enough.
Start with the injury to Ravens safety Bernard Pollard. It took more than four minutes of play in the second quarter before Dierdorf and Gumbel informed viewers that Pollard had been replaced by James Ihedigbo. While they showed Pollard getting injured, they never followed up....
There were little maddening things, like with 9:16 left in the second quarter, the camera focused on No. 24, Nnamdi Asomugha, on the Eagles bench. Why? I have no idea. The announcers never explained. I don't recall his name ever being called on the field. Just another random shot in TV hell from the production team at CBS. It wasn't the only one Sunday.
There were bigger maddening things, like Gumbel crediting DeSean Jackson (No. 10) with a touchdown catch when it was actually Jeremy Maclin (No. 18) who made the play. Gumbel did correct himself.
But later, the boys in the booth confused DeSean Jackson with LeSean McCoy (No. 25). Look at the numbers, guys, not the similarity of first names. Come on, this is network TV -- at the network that seemed to invent Sunday NFL coverage once upon a time.
Most maddening was the general lack of clarity and command in their analysis and overall call of the game.
Near the end of the contest with the game up for grabs, the referees seemed to go into a meltdown every time it came to spotting the ball after a penalty.
At 5:29 left, an incorrect spot had John Harbaugh screaming on the sidelines.
"There's a lot of Ravens fans, going, 'What?'" the boys in the booth said as they chuckled at Harbaugh's outrage. http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/z-on-tv-blog/bal-ravens-eagles-telecast-cbs-stinks-20120916,0,5890777.story
NASCAR has gone through incompetent reporting for years, especially with TNT.  But this year, ESPN has really sucked in their NASCAR coverage.  Their camera work has sucked, their commentators forget that the fans are not at the track and don't see everything going on and we don't know what happened if something happened on commercial.
Fox Sports has done a good job covering NASCAR and in years past, ESPN has done a good job but this year, they have sucked.  It seems like they are missing some cameras that cover all of the track.  Today, when Jeff Gordon crashed, all we got were some long distance shots of him crashing and one in camera shot.  This is typical of NASCAR coverage this year.
So, welcome, football fans, to our pain and misery.

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