Chris Mehring, the excellent announcer of the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, has been blogging during the interminable interregnum before baseball resumes.
(That is, if baseball is actually played in Wisconsin this year. Given the 345-foot frost depth and the depth of snow, I have my doubts.)
I have followed the Timber Rattlers since we moved to Appleton in 1984. But apparently I wasn’t paying enough attention, because I managed to miss their interesting, to put it one way, throwback and special uniforms over the years.
Mehring’s favorite apparently is a throwback to the 1970s of the Milwaukee Brewers …
… which is a bit ironic for a couple of reasons. The first-season Brewers uniforms were the only-season Pilots uniforms. That’s because the bankruptcy sale to Bud Selig took place during 1970 spring training. So the franchise arrived in Arizona as the Pilots and left as the Brewers. Something similar happened to the 1953 Boston-turned-Milwaukee Braves, but all that was required there was to change the hats from a B to an M. With the Brewers, the franchise literally took the PILOTS and SEATTLE lettering off and stitched BREWERS in their place.
This look replaced the Pilots-turned-Brewers uniforms. The other irony is that the Brewers were quite bad in this uniform. The 1978 pinstripe uniforms with the ball-in-glove logo coincided with a team that started to play like a baseball team, with the arrival of general manager Harry Dalton and manager George Bamberger.
Since changing from the Appleton Foxes to the Timber Rattlers in 1995 and moving from ancient Goodland Field to Fox Cities Stadium, the Timber Rattlers also have honored their current and hopefully permanent parent club …
… plus Appleton baseball teams of the past …
… the “Star Wars” movies …
… the nation on Independence Day …
… the military …
… hunting (yes, that’s camouflage and blaze orange) …
… and mothers:
(That look is a takeoff on the 1975–86 Houston Astros, whose uniforms with multiple shades of orange …
… were called the “Tequila Sunrise” uniforms by some and “rainbow guts” by others.
Given the Timber Rattlers’ colors (dark red and black), it’s surprising they haven’t chosen special rainbow-guts unis of their own, given that last year Louisville …
… and Mississippi State did:
Or perhaps they could emulate the worst uniform in baseball history, possibly the worst in all of sports history:
Interesting news from the world of sports media that has nothing to do with the Olympics, from Awful Announcing:
There were a lot of surprises coming out of the NFL’s announcement that CBS had picked up half of the package for Thursday Night Football. That Jim Nantz and Phil Simms are suddenly, primarily moved to a primetime package without as much Sunday work. That CBS won it at all, even though you would argue NBC and Fox needed the primetime ratings boost, especially on Thursdays.
The biggest one, and the most pleasant one, to me is the return of Saturday NFL games. Though NFL Network and, two seasons ago, ESPN have occasionally played on Saturday in recent years, and the league had to play on Saturday due to Christmas a couple of years ago, the NFL has been largely dormant on Saturdays since the early 00s. That’s a shame, in my opinion.
For many, many years, after the end of college football season, the NFL would sort of take its place on Saturdays in December. It would usually amount to an early afternoon game and a late afternoon game on both the regular AFC or NFC networks. Towards the end of the arrangement, ESPN was able to get in with some games, too.
Once the new agreement in 2005 came about, the NFL has mostly been without Saturday NFL games, save for the occasional NFL Network or ESPN game. One of the more famous Saturday night games happened in 2007. The New England Patriots completed their 17-0 season over their future Super Bowl usupers, the New York Giants. …
It’s good to see that as part of this new deal, we’ll see a Saturday Week 16 doubleheader on NFL Network. Even if it’s a 4:30/8 p.m. ET-style doubleheader, it’ll be a return to a good thing the league had going for quite sometime. It may be a silly thing to feel nostalgic about, but I’m weirdly happy to see it back.
This is a big win for CBS, which already is the most watched TV network, though Fox is number one so far this season among adults 18–49, thanks to Super Bowl XLVIII. In the most recent sweeps, in November, NBC was number one largely because of Sunday Night Football. Thursday night games may not have the ratings Sunday night games have, but you can bet they’ll be up near the top of the fall 2014 ratings.
Some commentators wanted NBC or Fox to win the contract for their cable sports channels. That ignores the fact that millions of Americans still get nothing but over-the-air TV, and the amount of live sports online (at least, sports people would actually want to watch) is very limited. (Fox had Super Bowl XLVIII online, but only if you were a subscriber to the right cable operator, and I believe that included no one in Wisconsin. Last year, though, CBS had Super Bowl XLVII online for anyone online.)
The center of the sports world will veer from the Meadowlands of New Jersey to a Russian resort in the next week.
There were dire predictions and considerable criticism about locating the Super Bowl outdoors in a cold weather area. Both are being realized, according to CBS:
The NFL’s biggest game of the season draws fans from around the world to its host city, but this year the game is in New Jersey, the forecast is frigid, and thousands of tickets are still available.
Tri-State area residents said that without the Jets or Giants playing on Sunday, the big game isn’t a big deal. Especially in New York where residents are used to hosting big shows and seeing celebrities walking around.
“It’s just aggravation. Going there, getting there. I’d rather sit in my living room,” one New Yorker said.
Ticket prices have fallen to $1,500 and haven’t stabilized so they could fall even lower. But it still may not be enough to get some local residents to Metlife stadium.
The fact that former Badgers Russell Wilson and Montee Ball are playing for the two teams doesn’t particularly interest me.
More interesting are the comments from Super Bowl XLV-winning coach Mike McCarthy, as reported by Monday Morning Quarterback:
We completed our game-plan work in Green Bay during the off week, preparing right up until our flight for Dallas on the Sunday before the game. Upon arrival, we were given an amazing welcome on the tarmac by two fire trucks that shot water over our plane. An ice storm hit Dallas that night, which in hindsight, I believe helped us. The storm created travel limitations, and as a result, our young team was doing a lot of things together that fostered bonding and camaraderie. …
Once Friday arrived, from a scheduling standpoint, the next 48 hours were pretty normal for us. I knew Sunday was going to be a long day, and as I had done in the past with night games, I pushed my themed talk to the team from Saturday night to Sunday morning. On Saturday night, we had a motivational speaker, Dr. Kevin Elko, speak with the team. Prior to his presentation, many of the guys were hanging out around the meeting rooms where they found a baby grand piano.
C.J. Wilson started playing while Greg Jennings and a number of guys sang spiritual songs for a good 25 to 35 minutes. It was special and something I’ll never forget. That moment gave me a lot of confidence that the guys were dialed in and ready to play. I always look for stress points in our team’s behavior and that was a very confident moment. Dr. Elko had a great talk that evening and after that meeting broke, the players walked out and were measured for their Super Bowl rings. The players really enjoyed the opportunity to see what they were playing for, not to mention the timing of that message. Like all nights before games, Saturday night concluded with a team snack. I’ve never heard so much hooting and hollering; the camaraderie, energy and confidence were through the roof. Dr. Elko and I were talking that night about the week and the interaction he observed among the players. He was amazed and I very clearly remember him telling me, “Mike, you’ve already won this game.” It’s easy for me to say it now, because we won the game, 31-25, but I felt very confident Saturday night.
The opportunity to speak to the team on Sunday morning is something I’ll always cherish and remember. My message was simple; it was about the “Power of ONE.” Our team was unified in the pursuit of ONE goal, and like the three letters in the word one, our team was made up of three units—offense, defense and special teams. Additionally, our team’s identity was characterized by three components—discipline, toughness and being fundamentally sound. Finally, I left the players with the reminder that they carry the history and tradition of the Green Bay Packers with ONE mind, ONE heart, ONE purpose and ONE goal. We were playing that night to take the Lombardi Trophy back to the ONE city where it belongs. It was our time to take it home. …
I did make one mistake surrounding the game, and it’s something that I regret to this day. I was not prepared for the postgame atmosphere after our Super Bowl victory. I had heard other coaches talk about postgame after they won and, frankly, I forgot all about it. That’s the only thing I wish I could change about my Super Bowl experience. We all work tirelessly for that moment and our families make sacrifices and support us, and I didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy it with them or the team the way I would have liked to in the immediate aftermath of the game. …
Overall, I really treasure the entire Super Bowl experience, but it’s easy to get consumed in the preparation for such a big game and everything surrounding it that you forget about the little things. Except when you look back, those things aren’t so little. A good friend of mine was coaching for the Ravens last year and I told him, “Whatever happens, make sure you get your family on that field after the game and enjoy that moment with your family and players. Don’t let that slip away.” When the Green Bay Packers win their next one, I’ll be much better prepared for that part of the experience.
Thanks to the outdoor setting, this game may well be determined by the weather. (Sunday’s East Rutherford, N.J., forecast: Cloudy, 30 percent chance of rain before noon, then a slight chance of showers after noon, high near 48, low 27, west wind 5 to 9 mph.) If the weather forecast is accurate, the conditions shouldn’t affect Peyton Manning much. If it’s more windy (and Giants Stadium was known for infamously swirling winds) and he can’t throw accurately, Seattle will win.
The Olympics got off to a Vinko Bogataj-like start, at least from the perspective of patriotic Americans, thanks to, of all things, a women’s hockey goaltender mask (from In Goal magazine):
The good news is the real gold can stay on Jessie Vetter’s new mask for the upcoming 2014 Sochi Olympics.
Unfortunately, the image of the United States constitution had to go, along with her name.
“No writings of any kind to promote the country is allowed,” Slater explained in an email to InGoal. “A sort of ‘our country is better than your country” kind of thing that the IOC frowns upon. Her name had to come off because they see it as self promotion. They wanted everything to be team based. … Our original idea was ‘land of the free, home of the brave,’ and that would have had to have been removed as well.”
This should not be surprising from the famously hypocritical and, among other attributes, anti-Semitic IOC. (See 1936 and 1972.)
This Olympics, really unlike any other before this, has the scepter of terrorist threat over it, and heavy-handed response to said terrorist threat over it, to the point that U.S. athletes have been telling their families to not come to Sochi. That would seem an overreaction in this country, but Russia is not the U.S.
The sports part of the Olympics is difficult to predict. No one thought that a group of college hockey players would win gold in 1980. Unfortunately, the Olympics has metastasized far beyond mere athletic competition, which makes it less worth your while.
On Sunday, CBS will carry the AFC championship between New England and Denver, and Fox will carry the NFC Championship between San Francisco and Seattle.
Each network will use its top NFL announcing pair — CBS’ Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, followed by Fox’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, who will also announce Super Bowl XLVIII.
This Saturday you couldn’t help but notice the diametrically opposed CBS and Fox announcing teams for the NFL Divisional Playoffs. In the early game, Fox rewarded the team of rookie play by play man Kevin Burkhardt and John Lynch with their first playoff assignment. In the late game, Hall of Famer Dan Dierdorf announced his last game alongside Greg Gumbel for the eighth consecutive year. Dierdorf had called a playoff game for CBS every year since joining the network for the 1999 season and Gumbel has been either the #1 or #2 announcer at the network save for two seasons when he hosted The NFL Today.
Only one of the broadcast teams were there based on merit – the Fox duo of Burkhardt and Lynch. The pair received positive reviews for their work on Fox throughout the season and the network has made it known their second playoff assignment is no longer set in stone as it had been for several years. Last year Thom Brennaman and Brian Billick replaced Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnston, and Tony Siragusa for the Divisional Round game. This year it was Burkhardt and Lynch. Fox has shown they are willing to give deserving announcers a chance on the big stage instead of depending solely on entrenched boardroom hierarchy. …
Announcing jobs in sports is one of the few professions in society that isn’t continually based on merit. Imagine if your productivity or quality of work dropped at your day job. You would be demoted or even fired if your work suffered a great deal. What about the sports that these networks cover? The Super Bowl and World Series aren’t contested between the same two teams every year, so why should networks assign the same announcers week after week, year after year to their biggest sporting events? Fans should ask themselves – is it really the birthright of Jim Nantz, Phil Simms, Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Al Michaels, Bob Costas, Chris Berman and others to be in their positions as lifetime appointments? Instead of a merit based system, once announcers climb the ladder to the top they stay there until they decide to walk away no matter how much criticism or praise their work may receive.
All over the sports world are examples of deserving announcers being held back from great opportunities because of the holiness of the status quo. In fact, there’s almost too many to list in this space. It’s the central reason why Gus Johnson left CBS for Fox Sports – he couldn’t break the March Madness glass ceiling that was Jim Nantz. How many years has Trey Wingo deserved to be the lead studio anchor for ESPN’s NFL coverage for his excellent work? It’s a subjective business, but consider how many younger announcers have been passed over by multiple networks that have decided to stick with older announcers who are bigger names, but well past their prime.
For multiple seasons now, media analysts and fans alike have been calling for Ian Eagle and Dan Fouts to receive a promotion from CBS, much like Fox gave Kevin Burkhardt and John Lynch. Eagle and Fouts have proven to be the best NFL announcing team at CBS over the past few seasons. In a merit based system, they should be the ones who deserve an opportunity to call the AFC Championship Game this weekend. They are informative, entertaining, and have great chemistry together. However, Eagle and Fouts will never sniff that kind of opportunity as long as Nantz and Simms have working vocal cords, let alone a chance to move to #2. CBS has refused to budge from their predetermined hierarchy, no matter how deserving younger and yes, better, announcers may be. …
Imagine how much different it would be if announcing assignments were based solely on merit and not longevity or name recognition. What if networks rotated who got to call the Super Bowl or host the Olympics? We got a window into that realm with Fox’s NFL Playoffs assignments this weekend and the universe shockingly did not collapse on itself. In fact, it turned out to be a victory for everyone involved. Fans were given a higher quality broadcast for Saints-Seahawks and Fox now has a legitimate top NFL announcing team in Burkhardt and Lynch. If more announcers were given more opportunities across sports, it would do wonders in giving a new, fresh perspective to broadcasts and build new stars across the industry. And isn’t that more beneficial than seeing the same ol’ same ol’ year after year?
There are a lot of things, other than their failure to employ me (and other greatchoices), that might mystify the sports viewer about the networks. The reason Fox uses Buck and CBS uses Nantz is that that’s what their contracts specify. Buck is Fox’s number one NFL and baseball announcer, and Nantz is CBS’ number one NFL, college basketball and golf announcer. Those decisions are based on business considerations, namely ad revenue and ratings.
But when you’re on the top, you’re a target. Bleacher Report selects its own bad Super Bowl announcers …
I have been trying to figure out how Aikman manages to use more words than any other sportscaster in the history of broadcast to say so little. Aikman will take five minutes to tell you about a 20-second play.
I don’t think the man has ever heard a cliche he didn’t like and use. And use. And use.
I think Aikman has some great insight. I just don’t have 45 minutes to wade through the wordage to figure out what it is. The game is going on and Troy’s just rambling on and on. …
Joe Buck
You know, there are some people who really like Buck’s forced enthusiasm but listening to him is like listening to a drunk guy try to convince you that he’s REALLY happy to be at the party his wife dragged him to.
Of course, there are large stretches of time when he’s not even faking it. He just sounds like he’s watching some game. You know, whatever, just some game.
Maybe that cuts it in baseball, where they play for 18 hours and the pace is slow but constant. In the NFL where the stop and start of a play, the rhythm of a game is violent and sudden? You need someone who sounds like they understand that every play is huge.
Buck calls a major play the same way he calls a minor play. ‘Oh, did that happen? A 70-yard catch? That’s interesting, first and goal.’
… which you may notice are three of Sunday’s announcers, and three of the four announcers who worked last year’s Super Bowl or will work this year’s Super Bowl.
There is a familiarity-breeds-contempt aspect to this. NBC’s Curt Gowdy, who announced seven of the first 13 Super Bowls, was also NBC’s lead baseball and college basketball announcer for most of that time. (Gowdy therefore also did 12 consecutive Rose Bowls on NBC, and did every Olympics on NBC and ABC from 1964 to 1984. He worked for ABC before he moved to NBC, yet still hosted ABC’s “The American Sportsman.) The latter stages of Gowdy’s career coincided with the rise of newspaper TV critics, and the latter weren’t kind to Gowdy toward the end of his career. (Gowdy, however, was in 22 halls of fame, and has a state park and post office in Wyoming named for him. Take that, Gary Deeb.)
Ratings may explain why some football fans prefer announcers other than the networks’ top announcers. Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman complained for decades that the top NFL announcer teams weren’t sufficiently focused on the actual game — line play and defensive schemes, for instance. The reason, of course, is that playoff games and specifically the Super Bowl and conference championship games attract more casual viewers than regular-season games. The announcers down the pecking order, who are only contract employees of the networks for the length of the NFL season, stick to the game because that’s their audience.
Readers know that I believe NFL viewers should have the right to decide on more than one set of announcers they want to listen to during the game. ESPN’s final NCAA football Bowl Championship Series game allowed viewers to choose between Auburn’s and Florida State’s announcers, in addition to ESPN’s duo. CBS did that during its NFL coverage in the 1950s and 1960s without the technology that exists today. For, say, a Bears-Packers game, if you were a Packer fan in Madison or Eau Claire (because the NFL blacked out home games in home markets), Ray Scott and Tony Canadeo delivered the game to you, while in Illinois, Red Grange and George Connor announced the game. Same video, but different audio.
The networks weren’t always locked in to announcers by ranking. Jack Buck was never CBS’ number one NFL announcer, but got to announce Super Bowl IV, won by his future partner, Hank Stram.
NBC used announcers of the participating teams in the World Series through 1976. The 1965 World Series featured Scott, who had worked for CBS, along with Vin Scully, who would later work for both CBS and NBC.
Because of that, baseball viewers got to hear the work of announcers they’d never otherwise get to hear, for better or sometimes worse:
Now, the only way you hear a local announcer nationally is if he’s also employed by the network:
And since, in this case, Nantz and Buck are full-time employees of CBS and Fox, respectively (as is NBC’s Al Michaels and ESPN’s Mike Tirico), they’re all you get, like it or not.
While we were recovering from New Year’s Eve or watching one of the 687 bowl games on New Year’s Day, Yahoo! Sports observed:
Green Bay has perhaps the best fans in the NFL … which is why the league should be very worried that the Packers and two other teams are still struggling to sell out their playoff games.
Green Bay, as of Wednesday morning, was about 8,500 tickets short of a sellout, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Tom Silverstein. If the Packers don’t sell out by 3:40 p.m. Thursday, the game will be blacked out on local TV from Green Bay to Milwaukee. That’s almost inconceivable. The Press-Gazette said the Packers have sold out every regular-season game since 1959 (a playoff game in January of 1983, at the end of the strike-shortened season, did not). And yet they are having troubles selling out a playoff game a week after Aaron Rodgers returned from injury to beat the Bears for the NFC North title.
The Bengals produced a video with some players urging fans to buy playoff tickets, which you wouldn’t think should be necessary for a NFL playoff game. Former Bengals receiver Chad Johnson said he would buy the unsold tickets, of which there are about 8,000 according to reports, but it’s unclear if he was serious. As of Wednesday afternoon the Colts needed to sell 5,500 tickets for their game against the Chiefs before Thursday afternoon to become a sellout and avoid a local television blackout.
It would be a tremendous embarrassment to the league to have three of four playoff games blacked out locally, and likely, the tickets will get sold somehow to avoid that scenario. But there’s a bigger issue here. Is this the most stark example that NFL fans aren’t too excited to go to games anymore?
A quick glance at Ticketmaster on Wednesday afternoon showed the face-value prices for the Packers playoff game ranged from $313 and $102, not counting Ticketmaster fees. If you’ve attended a NFL game, you know that the cost doesn’t end with tickets. Parking is outrageously and insultingly high at most NFL games. Concessions aren’t cheap either. NFL teams have gouged and gouged and gouged, and maybe there’s a breaking point.
It is supposed to be a high of four degrees in Green Bay on Sunday, when the Packers play the 49ers, with a low of minus-15 degrees. Would you rather spend a few hundred dollars to sit in miserable conditions or stay at home and watch on TV, where the high-definition view is a heck of a lot better than it is better than any vantage point in the stadium? It seems that more fans are asking themselves that question, especially as the in-home experience for watching games has improved with great televisions and easy access to discuss the game with friends online.
The NFL has a serious issue on its hands when three cities are struggling to sell out a playoff game, including the Packers. All three games might sell out and the local television blackout scare will be forgotten. But the NFL better not ignore what’s happening this week. It’s not a good sign for the future.
NFL rules stipulate that if the game isn’t sold out by 3:40 p.m. Thursday, or 72 hours prior to kickoff, there will be a television blackout in local markets, including Green Bay/Fox Cities, Milwaukee and Wausau. The Packers could ask for a deadline extension, and it’s believed the league would grant that request.
Packers director of public affairs Aaron Popkey said the organization remains “optimistic” the game will sell out and a TV blackout can be averted. It’s possible a corporate sponsor could step forward and buy the remaining tickets.
Even if that occurs, it’s baffling the Packers would have to go down to the wire to sell out the most important game of the season.
How could a franchise so rich in playoff tradition, with such a hardy fan base, find itself in a predicament usually reserved for NFL teams far less popular and successful?
Not counting games involving replacement players in 1987, the last time a Packers home game didn’t sell out was in January 1983 when they hosted the St. Louis Cardinals in a first-round playoff game and many disgruntled fans were turned off by a strike-shortened season.
But what excuse is there this year? The Packers won three of their last four games in dramatic fashion to capture a third straight division championship and fifth consecutive playoff berth. Plus, the return of quarterback Aaron Rodgers from a broken collarbone offers hope the Packers can do some damage in the postseason. …
There’s a combination of factors that have contributed to the Packers’ difficulty in selling tickets this week:
■ The forecast for Sunday’s game calls for a high in single digits and a below-zero wind chill. It’s understandable that instead of shelling out between $102 and $125 for a ticket to the deep freeze, a fan would rather watch the game from the comfort of a warm living room sofa on a high-definition, big-screen TV.
■ The Packers sent out playoff notices to season ticket holders during the worst part of their season when Rodgers’ return was uncertain and they were getting crushed by the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving. It’s likely many threw away their order forms thinking the Packers had no hope of earning a playoff berth.
■ The Packers overestimated the loyalty of their fan base by imposing a new no-refund playoff ticket policy in which unused money would be applied to next season’s tickets. The team also initially limited ticket sales this week to four per customer but quickly removed that restriction when it realized how slow tickets were selling.
■ The Packers added 7,000 seats to Lambeau Field this season, increasing the capacity to 80,750 and making it more difficult to sell out a game that isn’t part of the season-ticket package. It raises concerns that the Packers might have trouble filling their stadium, the third-largest in the NFL, if the team ever goes into an extended losing drought like it did in the 1970s and 1980s.
As a Packer shareholder, I got an email earlier this week:
Dear Green Bay Packers Shareholder,
The Green Bay Packers are pleased to offer an opportunity to purchase
tickets to the NFC Wild Card Game, scheduled for Jan 5th at Lambeau Field.
Thank you for your continued support of the Green Bay Packers. We look
forward to seeing you at Lambeau Field!
Fans younger than myself have gotten to see Packer games, wherever played, for their entire lives. So it might come as a surprise that, unless they lived within range of the Wausau or Madison CBS stations or points west, Packer fans did not get to see home games on TV before 1974, when the NFL’s current blackout policy came into existence.
Until 1973, the NFL blacked out TV broadcasts in teams’ home markets, which by the NFL’s definition included Green Bay and Milwaukee. From 1973 onward, home games were allowed to be broadcast only if the game was sold out within 72 hours of kickoff.
(The reason the blackout policy changed has to do with, believe it or don’t, the Packers. Green Bay’s only playoff berth in the 1970s sent the Packers to Washington. The Redskins won on the way to their first Super Bowl berth, in Super Bowl VII, but without any D.C. Redskins fans, most notably including President Richard Nixon, being able to see the games on TV. The story goes that Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, asked NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle to lift the blackout, a request Rozelle refused. Kleindienst then supposedly said the Nixon administration might have to review the NFL’s antitrust exemption. However, Congress beat Nixon to the punch, passing a law the following year that led to home games on TV.)
This has been an issue a few more times than Yahoo! and Vandermause reported. Preseason games at Milwaukee County Stadium sometimes didn’t sell out, so I recall not being able to see Saturday night preseason games until the following morning on WISC-TV in Madison. There were County Stadium games in the ’80s and ’90s that didn’t sell out until the Milwaukee TV station scheduled to carry the games purchased the remaining tickets before the deadline. The station bought the tickets, of course, to avoid the blackout and losing all the revenue from the commercials it sold for the game.
That is, I predict, what will happen if the final deadline (assuming an NFL extension, which is pretty likely) arrives without the remaining 7,500 (or fewer, one assumes at this point) tickets sold. Neither WLUK-TV in Green Bay nor WITI-TV in Milwaukee wants to lose the local ad revenue from Sunday’s game. If they buy the tickets, they will make less money on the game, but less revenue is better than no revenue.
This, too, hasn’t been uncommon elsewhere in the NFL over the years. The 1958 NFL championship, claimed to be the Greatest Game Ever Played, wasn’t seen in New York. One of the greatest postseason comebacks in NFL history, Buffalo’s 38-35 overtime win over Houston …
… wasn’t seen in Buffalo because the Bills didn’t sell out. One reason why the NFL hasn’t returned to Los Angeles since the departures of the Rams and Raiders is that Rams and Raiders games rarely sold out in L.A., even playoff games.
The NFL is the only professional league that has a blackout policy anymore. (Individual sports teams had their own blackout policies, however. The Chicago Blackhawks used to ban home-game broadcasts until owner William Wirtz, well, died. Wirtz’s son allowed home-game broadcasts. Wirtz’s son is much more popular in Chicago than his father was, for reasons beyond the two Stanley Cups.) The NFL obviously wants to keep people coming to the stadiums and spending money therein, particularly in all those stadiums built and renovated to make people spend money in them. For what it’s worth, the leagues that don’t have a blackout policy don’t always sell out early playoff games.
The reason the NFL’s blackout policy might have to end has to do with those new stadiums, believe it or not. In almost all cases, those stadiums have been built with significant taxpayer contribution. There is no constitutional right to watch a sporting event, but given that taxpayers, whether or not they are football fans, are paying for stadiums, that’s still a good point to bring up to politicians whose main goal is to get reelected.
I don’t think this is necessarily an ominous portent for the Packers, which could host the NFC Championship if they beat San Francisco Sunday and win their second-round game on the road. (I predict an NFC championship game at Lambeau will be sold out well before the blackout deadline.) Packer fans’ enthusiasm for the team doesn’t necessarily extend to unexpectedly spending more than $100 per ticket (plus air fare for those who can’t drive due to time or distance), immediately following the holidays, to sit outside in single-digit temperatures and below-zero wind chills, to watch a team that as recently as 10 days ago appeared to have no hope of getting into the playoffs. On the other hand, Packer tickets cost less than the league average, and Lambeau Field is one of the largest NFL stadiums. If I were part of the management team of the Bengals or Colts, I might be more disturbed, since Paul Brown Stadium is one of the smaller NFL stadiums, and Colts fans have no weather excuse given Lucas Oil Stadium’s retractable roof.
The NFL should find this disturbing too. Again, it’s right after the holidays, and playoff tickets are more expensive than regular-season tickets. But perhaps this demonstrates that the NFL’s appeal isn’t unlimited in the universe of entertainment and non-essential consumer spending. Maybe it also demonstrates that, contrary to what the Obama administration and its apologists want you to believe, the economy really isn’t good enough to spend a few hundred dollars to attend an NFL playoff game.
Sports on Earth does something NFL players have to endure each week, and NFL players probably would love to see:
Intolerable NFL commentators are legion. Of course, some of this is not their fault. We binge-watch the sport once a week, leaving us exhausted, annoyed, tipsy and in need of much needed physical exertion. We take it out on the people talking at us, who are conveniently not in the room to defend themselves.
That said, there has been no shortage of documentation regarding the awfulness of announcers — there’s an entire site titled Awful Announcing. During games, Twitter transforms into a firing squad aimed at conservative playcalling and the commentators who ineptly defend it.
Still, I couldn’t find any hard data on just how bad announcers actually are.
So I listened to 32 NFL games — two per crew — charting every foolish, false, annoying, ridiculous and downright dumb thing each of them said. I did this not because I enjoy it (it was, indeed, awful) but to determine which NFL crew is the worst of the lot.
In general, there are three types of announcer comments: good, neutral and bad. Good statements offer some type of insight into the game. This is inherently subjective, since different people know different things. Neutral statements constitute the bulk of their utterances: neither offensive nor insightful. As a result, I decided to measure the bad statements.
“Bad statements” are divided thusly — clichés (see the headline), factual errors, “nonsense,” self-references, taking plays off (which is a cliche itself, I suppose), and going off-topic. Examples of each:
Jim Nantz of CBS: “We go to the combine every March, and they have a way of measuring how fast you run, how high you jump, but they don’t have a way of measuring someone’s heart.”
Solomon Wilcots of CBS: “Nobody can catch the ball when it comes out of a Howzerwitz.”
Dan Dierdorf, who is retiring from CBS after this season: “Possession is nine-tenths of all that’s good about recovering a fumble.”
Tim Ryan of Fox: “Nobody can point fingers; everyone needs to look themselves in the mirror and self-reflect.”
Fox’s Tony Siragusa, who belongs in more than one category: “Talked to coach Marc Trestman a … about, you know, about he said to me I said you know this first half was pretty crazy, outrageous, he said as crazy and outrageous as it was, we’re only down seven points.”
First, the foulups by network:
Next, the bad work of play-by-play announcers …
… followed by their partners the color commentators:
The first problem, of course, is that evaluating an announcer on one game’s performance may not be an accurate reflection of his body of work. (Oops, another cliché.) To measure someone by errors instead of, for instance, a clever turn of phrase (see Scully, Vin) or a well-described (and not overdescribed on TV) play seems incomplete.
My quarter-century of broadcast experience on the side (most of the announcers on this list are not full-time employees of their network) emphasizes to me the basic responsibilities that some announcers miss — score and time (including periods or innings), to name the two most important. After that, you set the stage (down and distance in football, ball–strike count in baseball) and describe what’s happening (where’s the ball on the basketball floor, who has the ball in football, where was the ball hit in baseball, etc.).
I look at these charts, and I think to myself that I’m fortunate I call games on radio now, where listeners know only what the announcers tell them.
But the play-by-play responsibility doesn’t end there. There are commercials to read, and woe be unto you if you mispronounce advertisers’ names or can’t read the spots. You also need to promote future broadcasts or future programming.
The other thing, which you can read in the comments, is that viewers have personal preferences, positive and negative, and their minds will not be changed by documentation otherwise.
Writer Aaron Gordon has interesting things to say about the Fox announcers Packer fans love to hate (who are bringing you Super Bowl XLVIII for Fox, by the way):
It came as no shock that [Joe] Buck is one of the best in the business, with a paltry three infractions over two games. But only 26 infractions for [Troy] Aikman?! The fact that Aikman had a below-average number of infractions was the biggest surprise of the entire experiment.
My theory is that what makes Aikman such an insufferable voice is two-fold: He’s assigned to the very best games Fox carries despite providing no actual insight, and he has a bad tendency to simply re-state what the entire country has just witnessed. While maddening, it didn’t fall into any of the categories of this experiment. He’s rarely wrong and rarely says something totally ridiculous.
Still, Aikman can be prone to gaffes. He forgets players’ names (“I’m thinking of the punishment of … uh, who am I thinking about here …? Dez Bryant.”) and has a legendary capacity for unnecessarily doubling sentence lengths (“Hard to complain about getting the ball and those types of things when you don’t make those types of plays;” “If the defense can hold here on third down and not give up any points, I mean that would be a great possession for them in keeping this short of the Cowboys having to get a touchdown.”) or offering circular explanations (“Eventually, he’s going to break one like he just did.”; “The way that they’ve been able to run the football the way they have.”). The most exemplary instance of the Aikman vernacular was when he began a sentence with the phrase “Yeah no I mean hey.” Five words of complete and total uselessness.
Similar things are said by fans about half of the top-rated prime time announcers, NBC’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth:
They’re generally regarded as one of the best in the business, and I agree. Collinsworth is articulate and gives more useful insight than any other commentator, and it’s not even close. But this metric isn’t measuring that. We only want the dirt.
When this crew screws up, it’s because they’re bending over backwards to compliment a superstar or head coach. There’s something about authority and superstardom that makes these two more excited than a creepy old man at a Pilates class. It takes away from what is otherwise a well-called game.
Then there’s the ESPN crew of Mike Tirico and former Packer assistant coach Jon Gruden:
ESPN crews have a historically tough time balancing a vague mandate for general entertainment with calling an actual football game. Gruden, with his 29 infractions, can’t find the sweet spot between impersonating a caricature of a football coach and being a real person. Surprisingly, I counted only one “this guy” over two games. He still leans a bit heavy on “this kid,” though, with seven such utterances.
Some other Gruden quirks: He refers to third-down stops as “get-offs,” which sounds vaguely sexual. Here’s a deranged thing Gruden said:
“People forget Luck didn’t come into a great situation. He had to succeed a guy named Picket Manning. His coach had leukemia. But he went 11-5 and threw for 4,500 yards anyways. How do you top that?”
Yes, he actually called Peyton Manning “Picket” (I’ll ignore the bit about on-field accomplishments somehow mitigating his coach’s cancer). Another real thing Gruden said:
“The one thing I like about Toler and these Indianapolis corners, they are going to come right back the next down. They have no conscience.”
I don’t think Gruden knows what a conscience is, which has troubling implications. He also makes up Olympic events:
“I think this guy can be an Olympian acrobat.”
I like watching Tirico and Gruden, in part because you’re never quite sure what Gruden is going to say. I also enjoy Michaels and Collinsworth, and, yes, Buck and Aikman. (I may be one of the few people who gets Buck’s sense of humor, because we’re contemporaries.) Nantz and Simms are too vanilla, particularly Nantz. (Simms was better on NBC when he had co-analyst Paul Maguire to play off of, and Nantz is on too much CBS stuff.) Other than his game-ending cliches, you always get a solid broadcast from Nantz, but not necessarily something where you think what a witty guy Nantz is.
On the other hand, how Siragusa maintains Fox employment is beyond my ability to comprehend.
After a great deal of speculation wondering whether or not he would, Gov. Scott Walker signed the Indian tribal mascot bill.
Walker’s statement channeled the inner libertarian no one knew he had:
“I am very concerned about the principle of free speech enshrined in our U.S. Constitution. If the state bans speech that is offensive to some, where does it stop? A person or persons’ right to speak does not end just because what they say or how they say it is offensive. Instead of trying to legislate free speech, a better alternative is to educate people about how certain phrases and symbols that are used as nicknames and mascots are offensive to many of our fellow citizens. I am willing to assist in that process.
“With that in mind, I personally support moving away from nicknames or mascots that groups of our fellow citizens find seriously offensive, but I also believe it should be done with input and involvement at the local level.”
Well, maybe he does see it as a First Amendment issue. The cynical view is that Indian tribes give neither votes nor money to Republicans, whereas conservatives would be offended by a veto, so Walker signed the bill.
Regardless of motive, Walker did the right thing. There is no, and has never been any, intent to pick a nickname or mascot for the purpose of self-denigration. Complaints about self-esteem and institutional racism are a bunch of politically correct horse manure.
For some inexplicable reason, the state Democratic Party felt the need to send a news release with quotes from someone named Arvina Martin, listed as “(Ho-Chunk, Stockbridge-Munsee), chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin American Indian Caucus:
“In a time where public opinion moves against the use of American Indian imagery as school mascots, I am saddened that Governor Walker decided to take Wisconsin backwards by signing AB 297, regarding race based mascots in our public schools into law.
“Walker falsely claims that signing this legislation will protect the free speech rights of school districts while failing to realize that First Amendment does not allow government programs, in this case, schools, to offend, harm or otherwise discriminate against citizens.
“With a stroke of his pen, Governor Walker ignored the statements of many, both American Indian and non-American Indian, in order to push through legislation that does nothing but further marginalize American Indians in our state.”
Martin, not surprisingly, didn’t consult those with opposing views before her blanket “public opinion” statement. Consider a newspaper poll in an area with numerous Indian-nicknamed high schools, asking whether high schools should be required to change their Indian nicknames:
Yes: 24.
No: 174.
“It depends on the nickname”: 70.
Only a PC-sodden reading of the First Amendment allows protection from being “offend”ed. I wonder how opponents of abortion rights feel about government funds — that is, their own tax dollars — funding abortions. I suspect they are considerably more than offended, but what is their recourse? None. For that matter, I am offended that state legislators make as much money by themselves as the average family in this state. To quote John Cougar Mellencamp, my opinion means nothing.
Since I had never heard of Martin before last week, I have no idea if she’s an elected official somewhere. I certainly hope she never becomes an elected official outside a reservation, because her view of the First Amendment is an offense by itself.
The head of the state’s education establishment, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, isn’t happy either:
“The children of Wisconsin are not served well when legislation makes it more difficult for citizens to object to discrimination they see in local schools. There is a growing body of research documenting the negative educational outcomes associated with the use of American Indian mascots, logos, and nicknames. Yet this new law requires the signatures of 10 percent of a school district’s membership to file a complaint about an Indian mascot or logo. In no other situation of harassment, stereotyping, bullying, or discrimination must an individual gather signatures from others to have the matter considered by a government body.
“While many local school districts have moved away from race-based mascots, there are a few left.
Civil rights issues have seldom been resolved locally. This law is a disservice to the children of Wisconsin and their education.”
Evers is not only himself “a disservice to the children of Wisconsin and their education”; now he’s throwing not-so-veiled threats. (Since court challenges to school mascots have failed anywhere, I’d suspect Evers’ threat is an empty threat, except that you can’t guarantee that in an Obama appointee-poisoned federal judicial system.) To make this is a civil rights issue is to cheapen the entire concept of civil rights. (And it once again makes me wonder why in the world Wisconsin conservatives cannot find a candidate to remove Evers and his predecessors of the last 40 or so years and find an advocate for the two groups of people whose opinion should count in schools — parents and taxpayers — more by far than they do.)
As long as we’re being cynical here, I’m surprised an obvious solution didn’t come to the minds of tribal leadership. The tribes are making millions of dollars every day from their Wisconsin casinos. School districts are living in fiscally lean times, thanks to the abuses of government of the past. Most of the school districts with Indian mascots probably would have been just fine with changing them had the tribes been willing to pay the costs of the changeover — athletic uniforms, school signage and so on.
… the National Football League still played today in 1963.
Sports Illustrated’s Monday Morning Quarterback tells the tale of the game between Philadelphia and Washington, preceded with …
Early on the afternoon of the fourth Friday of November 1963, Philadelphia and Washington were practicing for their game that Sunday, each team’s 11th game of a lost season. Three years earlier the Eagles of quarterback Norm Van Brocklin and linebacker Chuck (Concrete Charlie) Bednarik had won the NFL championship, and they had followed that up with a contending 10-4 season. But the heart of that team was gone, and these Eagles had won just five of their past 23 games. The Redskins hadn’t won a league title since 1942 and hadn’t had a winning season since ’55. They would go to Philadelphia with only three wins in their previous 18 games.
The Redskins held their practice on a field by the Anacostia River, a few hundred yards from two-year-old D.C. Stadium, where they played home games. The team had just begun position drills at various spots on the field when coach Bill McPeak blew his whistle and called the players together. Everybody up, everybody up! Pat Richter, a 22-year-old rookie wide receiver and punter—and the team’s first-round draft choice, from Wisconsin—walked toward the gathering with a sense of foreboding that sticks with him five decades later. “It was eerie,” he says. “You looked around at the roadwaysand it was quiet, and you sensed that something had happened, but you didn’t know what it was.” …
Players from both teams, and from the other 12 in the NFL, awaited word from [commissioner Pete] Rozelle on whether the seven games scheduled for Sunday would be played. There was no template for such a decision; the country had never buried a sitting president in the television era. Some college football games were played that Saturday, others were not. The NBA and NHL continued playing on the weekend, yet the fledgling American Football League called off its games. Rozelle sought the counsel of White House press secretary Pierre Salinger, who had been his University of San Francisco classmate. Salinger advised Rozelle to play the games, and Rozelle gave the go-ahead on Friday night.
“I’ve never questioned it,” Salinger told SI’s Peter King in 1993, nine years before he died. “This country needed some normalcy, and football, which is a very important game in our society, helped provide it.”
As the story of the Kennedy assassination weekend has been recounted over the past half century, a certain narrative emerged: NFL players were marched like gladiators to the Colosseum to distract the masses as the President lay in stateand the man accused of killing him was gunned down in the basement of a Dallas police station. There was some truth to this. “There was an empty feeling,” says [Eagles receiver Pete] Retzlaff, “and I didn’t feel like we should go out and play football under the circumstances.”
Yet they were employees, under contract and powerless. “There was no activism among athletes at that time,” says Richter. “This was something the commissioner said to do, so you did it.”
Some players saw nothing wrong with this. “I wanted to play,” says [defensive back Lonnie] Sanders. “I thought it would be relaxing for us, and maybe it would help the mood of the entire country.”
[Linebacker Maxie] Baughan agrees. “I thought it was the right thing to play,” he says. “There was nothing [the fans] could dobut sit at home and mope. They couldn’t change what happened.” …
They played the games that Sunday, like every other Sunday. They played in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and New York City. Every stadium was packed. “There were, at Yankee Stadium yesterday, 63,800 who went through the turnstiles,” wrote Stan Isaacs in Newsday. “Nobody twisted anybody’s arm.” It was perhaps the very first inkling of the real power of the NFL. Or perhaps people just needed a place to gather. …
“It almost felt like we were all in church, not in a football stadium,” says Betty Lou Tarasovic, wife of Eagles lineman George Tarasovic. “It was crowded, but there was none of that raucous feeling you usually have at a football game. It was solemn. I remember right after the game started, the announcer said that Oswald had been shot in Dallas.” (Oswald’s murder by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, at 11:21 CST in the Dallas police headquarters, had been shown live on national television. None of the NFL games that day were broadcast on network TV.) …
Years later Rozelle would call the decision to play on that Sunday the worst of his 29-year commissionership. But the Eagles remember another response. During the 1964 season Robert Kennedy visited the team. “He told us we did the right thing by playing,” says Baughan. “He said that’s what his brother would have wanted.” It’s an absolution that many of them have carried into old age
The Packers hosted San Francisco at Milwaukee County Stadium. The Packers won 28–10. About which, Packers News writes:
Vince Lombardi hid it well, but some of his former players said the legendary Green Bay Packers coach took the assassination of President John F. Kennedy very hard.
“There’s no question that bothered him as much as anything I’d ever seen,” Hall of Fame defensive lineman Willie Davis said in a telephone interview this week.
Friday marked the 50-year anniversary of Kennedy’s death, and Davis remembers Lombardi being stoic and internalizing his grief over the slain president.
Davis remains convinced the last thing Lombardi wanted to do was play a football game just two days after Kennedy was killed.
“It was a thing by game time that had truly sapped him of all of his energy and passion and everything else,” Davis said.
Lombardi and Kennedy had a lot in common and developed a personal relationship. Both grew up on the East Coast, both were devout Catholics and both loved football.
On the final Sunday of Kennedy’s life in November 1963, he watched the Packers-Chicago Bears game on television. While Kennedy the politician maintained his neutrality, he played a role in the Packers’ first championship under Lombardi two years earlier.
Prior to the 1961 NFL title game between the Packers and New York Giants, Lombardi put in a call to Kennedy on behalf of Paul Hornung, who was serving in the Army during the Cold War.
According to various reports, Lombardi asked if Kennedy could grant Hornung a weekend leave so he could play in the title game, and the president came through.
Kennedy reportedly said, “Paul Hornung isn’t going to win the war on Sunday, but the football fans of this country deserve the two best teams on the field that day.”
Hornung scored a then-record 19 points in the Packers’ 37-0 victory over the Giants, and Kennedy sent Lombardi a congratulatory telegram.
There was an obvious connection between the two leaders, one from the political world and the other from the sports world.
“You knew there was some relationship,” said Jerry Kramer, the starting right guard on the five Packers’ championship teams during the 1960s.
“(Lombardi) had identified I think with President Kennedy and President Kennedy identified with him.”
Lombardi respected authority, so when NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle decided the games would go on immediately after the assassination, the Packers coach dutifully followed orders. But Kramer knew Lombardi’s heart wasn’t in it, and the same went for his players.
“He was upset, but he hid his emotions pretty well,” said Kramer, who vividly remembers Lombardi saying to the team: “ ‘All right, we’re going to play the damn game, so let’s get on with it.’ ”
That was in stark contrast to Lombardi’s normal approach to a game.
“He obviously wasn’t happy about it, he didn’t think we should (play),” Kramer said. “The way he said ‘we’re going to play the damn game,’ he never talked that way about the ‘damn game.’ I don’t think I ever heard him use that term where football was concerned. The amount of emotion he showed us was in that statement … he was disturbed by it and he was upset by it.”
Many sporting events that weekend were called off. The American Football League and Big Ten postponed their games, and only about 20 college games were played that weekend.
But Rozelle, after consulting with Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger, decided playing the games was something the deceased president would have wanted.
So at 8:30 on the morning after the assassination, the Packers boarded a train from Green Bay to Milwaukee in advance of their Sunday game against the San Francisco 49ers at County Stadium. According to a Press-Gazette story, players discussed the assassination in small groups on the trip, with some admitting they couldn’t hold back tears.
A crowd of 45,905 watched the Packers win handily, 28-10, although there were no player introductions, no halftime musical entertainment and no commercial announcements during the game.
The Press-Gazette reported that a large flag flew at half staff during the game, and a moment of silence was observed prior to kickoff.
Davis said to this day he believes there was no justification for playing games so soon after such a tragic event. …
“For me, it really kind of shook my world,” Kramer said. “It made me uncertain of everything. If this can happen in this country, with everything we know and everything we have to protect our president, if our president can get killed, is there anything that can’t happen?“What is solid? What is something you can depend on? What is there out there that you know is strong and real and solid and it’s going to last? Is there anything?”
Four of Southwest Wisconsin’s football teams are playing in the WIAA Football Championships at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison. Black Hawk, of the Six Rivers Conference, will play defending Division 7 champion Glenwood City at 10 a.m. Darlington, of the Southwest Wisconsin Activities League, will play Shiocton for the Division 6 title at 1 p.m. Lancaster, Mrs. Presteblog’s alma mater, will play Stanley–Boyd (the team, not a person) for the Division 5 title at 4 p.m.
And then, at 7 p.m., Platteville, with a 9–4 record, will play Winneconne, with an 8–5 record, for the Division 4 championship, at 7 p.m. in what someone has already called the Cinderella Bowl. That’s the game I get to announce, one week after this two-hour-long heart attack.
All of the games will be on wglr.com, and I assume there will actually be no non-football programming between the Black Hawk pregame 9:30-ish and the end of the Platteville game around 10 p.m. WGLR should stand for something like Wisconsin Gridiron Live Radio or something like that.
Then, 13 hours after kickoff, I’ll be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review segment Friday at 8 a.m.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
This is the second time this year that I’ve done a WGLR/WPR doubleheader. The first one, though in reverse order, ended in a Platteville win. So perhaps that’s a portent of tonight.
The headline comes from George Patrick, a deep-voiced eastern Iowa rock and roll DJ and TV station announcer.
What is big is this weekend in southwest Wisconsin football. Four teams play tonight and Saturday for the right to go to Camp Randall Stadium in Madison and play in the state championships Thursday. I get to announce one of those teams, Platteville, playing Manitowoc Roncalli at Watertown at 7 p.m. (Which you can hear online at http://www.theespndoubleteam.com.)
As if that’s not enough, UW-Platteville plays at UW-Oshkosh Saturday with a hoped-for NCAA Division III playoff berth in the balance. (Also heard, though not with me, at http://www.theespndoubleteam.com.)
More thoughts on both Platteville games can be read here.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 