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Home  Daily Digest The Unbridled Power of Pittsburgh Fandom
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The Unbridled Power of Pittsburgh Fandom |
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Written by Matt Gaventa
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Wednesday, 08 February 2006 |
 Days after the big game, and the story has been almost entirely about the questionable officiating throughout the game. Of course, Seahawks bloggers were on this even as the game was still in progress, and that general sentiment has permeated into the mainstream, so that we are calling the game both sloppy and controversial. For maybe another twenty-four hours; then, we’ll move on. In the meantime, let’s examine a completely different kind of bias: the ABC broadcast.
There are certain sportscasters that we assume will be biased in their play-by-play or commentary. Just this morning, we heard Dick Vitale on ESPN Radio and were reminded of his lifelong love affair with those Duke Diaper Dandies. This is one kind of broadcast bias, and we’re certainly not accusing Michaels or Madden of team favoritism. In many ways, Madden seemed unusually critical of the officiating, a stance we were glad to see as the game progressed. The more pressing concern is ABC’s programming strategy for the entire afternoon. Within ten minutes of the beginning of the pregame show, ABC aired its only in-depth profile of any Seahawk, a brief documentary on the Hasselbeck family. After that, it was all-Steelers, all the time. During the game, the network aired six short commercial-length mini-docs about various players of note on the field: the first three, during the first half, were for Palomalu, Big Ben, and Cowher. In the second half we saw one for all the players together, one for Hasselbeck again, and then one from Jerome Bettis. That’s a lot of Steelers. And while it seems obvious that a large majority of the viewing public were rooting for Pittsburgh – after all, the game got the highest ratings since the last time Pittsburgh was in the Super Bowl – ABC owes the NFL and its fans better than a broadcast that panders only to a projected fanbase. And it’s not like the Seahawks don’t offer some reasonable share of interesting stories. Mike Holmgren is not a nobody, and the last time we saw him in this game he was coaching media-friendly juggernaut Brett Favre. Shaun Alexander is the league MVP and set the single-season touchdown record (and is clearly just a bit too nice, almost insanely so) – these guys have a valid claim to their own sappy backstories, but ABC just clearly wasn’t trying. It felt like a Yankees broadcast on YES. But somehow we expect more – though perhaps we should not – from a major national media event.
Where It Stops, Nobody Knows
The Monday after the regular season of the NFL ends is often known as Black Monday, because of the preponderance of coach firings that happen among the league’s less fortunate. We might want to apply that label equally to the Monday after the Super Bowl, when apparently sportscasters were just jumping from branch to branch (and occasionally falling on their asses). The big news broke today: Al Michaels is out. After weeks of speculation, his exit was announced in a throwaway paragraph at the bottom of a press release from ESPN announcing that Kornheiser, Tirico, and Thiesman would be your new MNF team. So Michaels leaves not with a bang but with a whimper, at least in Bristoldom. To what extent his exit will make larger waves, it’s hard to know, and we don’t yet have confirmation that he is in fact going to follow partner John Madden to NBC’s Sunday Night lineup. But it seems reasonable to assume just that; Michaels had let that rumor float around for several weeks prior to the Super Bowl. Perhaps as payback for that publicity, ESPN’s backhanded announcement seems so obviously embittered; Bristol will be content to let him pass with nothing but a quiet exhalation. Meanwhile, we have a truly manic Monday Night Football threesome to look forward to, along with the news that PTI will be going “on the road” every Monday to broadcast live from the MNF location. None of this exactly vibes with the public persona that Kornheiser has been grooming since the show went on the air; he’s supposed to be in bed well before halftime, and has rarely gone on the road for location shoots. We are forced to wonder if he is again redistributing his time between ESPN and The Post, and whether his newspaper columns will take even another hit in terms of both frequency and depth. Elsewhere: James Brown is leaving Fox’s NFL lineup, and leaving it with only Terry Bradshaw to follow in his footsteps as the network’s regular host. We find this difficult to imagine: Bradshaw is obviously a strong personality in the studio, but this doesn’t seem that far away from suggesting that Irvin could replace Chris Berman; Fox needs someone with diplomatic charisma to run the circus, not one of the clowns.
Brown is heading to CBS’s NFL Today, where he will take over for Greg Gumbel, who is going back to play-by-play. Yes, yes, try to keep up. Andrea Kramer is reportedly getting wooed by NBC’s Sunday Night Lineup – she is under contract with Bristol, but it’s not like that stopped Al Michaels.
Last, but not least, Bonnie Bernstein is leaving CBS. And the truth v. rumors department is just overflowing with goodness; she claims to be leaving to found a consulting firm though there is some speculation that the dismissal was less than amicable. On the mega-carousel that seems to be the sports media job market these days, this one smells just a bit funny, and not just because we, like Deadspin, don’t really have any bones to pick with her journalistic skills.
We’re off to gear up for some Olympics mania. Have a good Wednesday.
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