SI.com did a story about the most hated National Football League team, player, owner, etc.

All obviously are opinions, but I particularly enjoyed this one, from SI sports TV writer Richard Deitsch:

Here is an absolute truism for NFL broadcasting: The most hated NFL announcer is the one doing your game. Did you hear how he called that touchdown pass for the other guys? It was like he was rooting for them, no? And he was definitely celebrating when your quarterback got picked in the fourth quarter. Hey, I sympathize with you. How can the networks assign these guys to your team every week? They are totally biased.

Why does he (and it’s always a him, no?) hate your team? Well, he is biased against your team for a number of reasons, including that he played against your team when he was a player. Those bonds run deep. If he’s calling the play by play, he likely doesn’t like your team because he grew up rooting for your rival. Didn’t he grow up in that other city? The only truth here is that he hates your squad. He really does. Do not try to convince anyone otherwise. The most hated announcer in the NFL is calling your game this week and next week and the week after that. This will never change.

The announcer hate is more often than not focused around Fox Sports’ Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. (Though comments on the story included CBS-TV’s Phil Simms and NBC-TV’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth too.) Despite the fact that Buck, the son of Jack Buck, one of the Ice Bowl announcers, says he loves Green Bay, Packer fans do not appear to love Buck back.

The reason more than anything is Buck’s partner, Troy Aikman, because Aikman was the quarterback of the Cowboys, the main roadblock between the Packers (and, by the way, every every other NFC team) and the Super Bowl until Jerry Jones lost his mind and fired coach Jimmy Johnson. Neither Don Meredith nor Roger Staubach, former Cowboys quarterbacks, were nearly as disliked as Aikman when Meredith was on ABC’s Monday Night Football or Staubach briefly announced for CBS. Terry Bradshaw was the quarterback of the most dominant NFL team of the 1970s, the Steelers, but there is little animus toward Bradshaw.

Buck and Aikman have done more Packer games than any other announcer duo for the past several seasons because Fox does all NFC road games that aren’t on NBC’s Sunday Night Football or ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and the Packers have been really good for the past several seasons. In the same way that some Packer fans don’t appreciate the current success because they weren’t around for, or forgot through a mental-health defense mechanism, the post-Vince Lombardi pre-Brett Favre years, some Packer viewers don’t appreciate that Fox (and CBS when the Packers host an AFC team) assigns one of its top two teams to most Packer games because the Packers are usually in an important game with viewership into parts of the U.S. that don’t have a local team.

The most common Packer announcer pairing in the Gory Years seemed to me to be Lindsey Nelson and former Packer running back Paul Hornung. Hornung also did Packer preseason games on statewide TV, because the Packers were usually not good enough to warrant a CBS, NBC or ABC nationwide preseason game. Hornung was all right, though some would argue his game preparation left something to be desired, and he would incorrectly pronounce “WIS-con-sin.” CBS also used Gary Bender, after CBS hired him away from a Madison TV station (he also did radio with Jim Irwin), to do some Packer games.

Some games, though, CBS and NBC assigned announcers to Packer games that made the viewer wonder how in the world they got hired. There were some announcer pairs whose work could have been easily eclipsed by some Wisconsin radio high school football announcers. (Packer announcer Wayne Larrivee points out that high school football is actually the hardest sport to announce, because the announcer is responsible for 100 percent of his game prep.) Players would be misidentified or not identified (in Brett Favre’s first win, NBC announcer Jim Lampley didn’t identify wide receiver Kittrick Taylor until several seconds after he was standing in the end zone holding the football), facts would be incorrect (former Fox announcer Jerry Glanville said Packer fans would be celebrating in “Owosso,” which prompted partner Kevin Harlan to say that he had never heard of an Owosso in his home state), and there was no more team insight beyond what you could read in your local daily newspaper.

The SI story gets to a point I’ve made here before, which is a way to get past the I Hate the Announcer thing and improve the broadcast from the viewer’s point of view.

When CBS first started carrying NFL football in the late 1950s, the network decided — in an era well before usable computers and digital anything — to have each game announced by announcer duos who followed each team. If you watched the Packers in Wisconsin, you heard the dulcet tones of Ray Scott and the insight of former Packer running back Tony Canadeo on CBS, every week. Scott was excellent, though not the same kind of announcer as radio announcers Ted Moore (in the 1960s) and Irwin (from the 1970s to 1998) were. The Vikings had longtime Twins announcer Herb Carneal, and the Lions had longtime Tigers’ announcer Van Patrick. The Eagles used two Philadelphia announcers, the Phillies’ Byrum Saam and the Philadelphia Warriors’ Bill Campbell, whose main claim to fame was announcing Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game. The Colts used longtime Orioles announcer Chuck Thompson.

This presented several advantages for viewers. Any announcer who covers a team every week learns more about that team than someone who does team A this week, team B next week, team C the week after that, and so on. The Internet can provide announcers with more information than they can possibly use, but there really is no substitute to sitting down and talking with coaches and players more often than the brief Friday or Saturday meetings the announcers now have with each team. Mispronunciations of names were the result of, well, announcers always mispronouncing names. (Think Harry Caray if he ever did the NFL; he did not, though he did do University of Missouri football for a few years.)

CBS probably had to use more audio staff, but there was one camera feed, and one producer and one director per broadcast. For postseason games, generally one announcer from each team would work; Scott announced the first half and Buck, then the Cowboys’ announcer, announced the second half of the Ice Bowl alongside Frank Gifford.

For the last two seasons Turner has had team-centered broadcasts for the Final Four semifinals. Larrivee announced the last two UW Final Four semifinals on the Badgercast (or whatever it was called), and that allowed UW fans to not have to listen to the Kentucky worship of CBS’ Jim Nantz and his partners.

Given the technology available today (namely the Second Audio Program), I don’t understand why Fox and CBS can’t do the same today, by employing team-centric announcers for its NFL coverage. Other than Buck, the Fox NFL Sunday crew and, I believe, Albert, all of Fox’s other NFL announcers appear to be paid on a per-game basis, so doubling the number of announcers actually wouldn’t be a huge revenue hit. Fox would have to hire announcers for 14 games (because all teams have two games carried by a non-Fox network).

You might ask yourself why Fox would do this. You might say that announcer hate is irrational and based on fan bias, and you may even be correct. Well, why have CBS and Turner split off Final Four semifinal games to have participant-centered broadcasts? Why did ESPN do different-perspective broadcasts for the college football national championship?

In an era of expanding consumer and viewer choice, this seems like the next logical step, particularly for a network known for innovation and thinking outside the box. (That has brought us the one-hour pregame show — reportedly expanding to two hours this season — and continuous score and time on the screen, but it has also brought us Tony Siragusa.) It would also be the least Fox could do for its viewers given that cable TV and satellite TV costs are not going down.