NBC Sports & Olympics Chair Dick Ebersol yesterday indicated the net’s “Football Night in America” studio show will change its directional tone, cutting back on the amount of highlights from that day’s games to allow for more league analysis and previews of that night’s primetime broadcast. Ebersol: “We have failed to clear out enough time to discuss football, and we’ve been too locked in on highlights for every game.” While clips from each game will still be shown, Ebersol noted there will be “much more emphasis on the whys of what happened at that game than we’ve had in the past.” Ebersol: “I feel that we’ve been neglect in that area.”Despite the fact that they absolutely over-loaded on bad analysts (Collinsworth was the only good one), the one thing that kept me coming back to FNIA week after week was the fact that they showed good, in-depth highlight packages with the funny lines from Keith Olbermann and starting last year, Dan Patrick joining him. And now, by cutting out a lot of the highlight segments, they are absolutely destroying the show, destroying what made the show great, and possibly losing my viewership.
It's bad enough for FNIA that the one good analyst they had, Cris Collinsworth, is now John Madden's replacement in the booth, but instead of doing what I think would be natural for them at this point and go to more highlights, they are going to less. Tiki Barber contribues absolutely nothing both as an analyst and an on-site interviewer (notice he was pretty much always with New York or NFC East teams). Jerome Bettis just is not cut out for an analyst's position and subsequently is no longer on the show. So now in the studio you have two unproven analysts in Rodney Harrison and Tony Dungy, none of whom really wowed me during their little stints they did for the Super Bowl pre-game show, will now in essence be carrying the bulk of the load for FNIA. Instead of putting all of the weight on the back of 2 unproven analysts, why don't you load up on highlights with Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, 2 guys who have a chemistry together like none other and who work really well together.
And from a more personal stand point, I need the highlight shows especially seeing as I am in college during the football season and don't have access to my family's NFL Sunday Ticket. If I am lucky, I get to see 4 afternoon games (I get 2 different CBS affiliates which occasionally show different games at the same time) and that's it. Otherwise it's just I am stuck with what I get and you can bet your bottom dollar that I am not always happy with the game that I am stuck with! So when I first started college last year, seeing the in-depth highlights from FNIA was more important than ever before. And now by minimizing them, they have officially alienated me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't ESPN have a 7 PM ET SportsCenter with Chris Berman and Tom Jackson (and a few others), that while although it does not have the highlights as quite as in-depth as only FNIA is permitted with those, at least it is something. Assuming that they do do that, I think I might be officially switching back to Berman. As annoying as Berman can be, him and Tom Jackson worked really well together and every Sunday I would look forward to watching NFL Primetime about as much as I looked forward to watching the Eagles every Sunday. So when NBC took over the rights to SNF, I needed a replacement show for that and started watching FNIA, as a replacement to Primetime which is now on Mondays and has since been thrown completely in the gutter by having Stu Scott host it. I did not think the show was great at the time, but when they brought in Keith Olbermann (I had not seen Countdown before that and any recollection I may have in the back of my mind of his SportsCenter and Fox Sports days are fuzzy at best and nonexistent at worst) a year later, everything turned around for them and the show instantly got entertaining and fun to watch again. But now that FNIA is essentially eliminating that part of the program, I think it's time to go back to ESPN.
Yep, I think it's time to start eagerly watching Chris Berman again on Sundays at 7. Fuck NBC.
that's crazy. its not like they were doing 2 mins of every game,like in the heyday of Primetime, they were doing only 3 or 4 plays for most games. and they think that was too much? are they laying off all of the video people to pay for their cavalcade of "anaylsts"?
ReplyDeleteI believe FNIA should have consisted of Costas, Barber, Olbermann, Patrick and King. The less anaylsis by paralisis the better.
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