Brent Musberger is the single worst announcer in sports.<\/p>\n
“That’s a bold assertion,” you say. “I find that hard to believe. I mean, he’s famous.”<\/p>\n
Allow me to explain: Musberger generally calls games for ABC as part of a two-man announcing team. Musberger is the “play-by-play” guy, and the other member of the team, the “color commentator” is usually a former player or coach. Yesterday, for example, the color guy was former UCLA coach Steve Lavin, the Haircut Who Walks Like a Man.<\/p>\n
The job of the ex-jock “color commentator” is to be, well, colorful. They’re supposed to provide some sort of insight from the perspective of a coach or player, illuminating some of the subtleties of the game for the people watching at home. They’re allowed to be opinionated, and on local stations are often ridiculous homers who openly root for the team whose games they call.<\/p>\n
The “play-by-play” guy is really a holdover from radio, and his job is to convey information to the audience at home. He’s supposed to let us know who has the ball (as it’s often difficult to tell in wide shots), who got called for a violation, what the violation was, and remind us of the score and any other relevant statistics. He also provides prompts for the color guy.<\/p>\n
A sports broadcast can recover from an idiot color commentator, provided the play-by-play guy is good. The color commentary is just for color, after all, and if the color guy is addled, distracted, biased, or just plain dumb, well, he’s annoying, but at least you can still tell what’s going on.<\/p>\n
There is no hope of recovery for a broadcast with a bad play-by-play announcer, though, which is why I say that Brent Musberger is the worst announcer in all of sports.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Take yesterday’s Maryland-UNC game, for example. After all, it’s what prompted this rant.<\/p>\n
On at least five occasions, play stopped because of a whistle, and they went to commercial without telling us what had been called<\/strong>. This is the most basic and fundamental job of a play-by-play announcer: to let us know what’s going on on the court. Musberger couldn’t be bothered– they just went into the commercial break, without any explanation of why play had stopped to allow the break. Was it a foul? Who was the foul on? Who knows?<\/p>\n On several occasions, Musberger got plays flatly wrong. In the most egregious example, he attributed a Maryland basket to by Landon Milbourne to Marcus Ginyard, who plays for the other team<\/strong>. He didn’t even appear to notice, and certainly never corrected it. On one play, he was confused about who was supposed to get the ball, and spent an entire thirty-second timeout talking about strategy for Maryland inbounding the ball, while an on-screen graphic informed the viewers that it was UNC ball.<\/p>\n When he’s calling a game, your best hope of understanding what’s actually going on is to turn the volume up really loud, and try to hear the arena PA announcements in the background.<\/p>\n What did he do instead of, you know, his job<\/strong>? He babbled about other teams in other conferences, bantered idiotically with Lavin about some trivia question about famous guys named “Williams,” and generally chattered like a bimbo on a morning talk show. His producers were doing their jobs, as informative and useful graphics appeared on screen at regular intervals, but he only rarely deigned to notice them, and usually kept on talking about whatever unrelated subject he was off on before they so rudely tried to inform the audience.<\/p>\n He’s particularly toxic when paired with Dick Vitale, whose continuing recovery from vocal cord surgery was the saving grace for this game. Musberger-Vitale is edged out for Worst Announcing Team in Sports by Mike Patrick and Vitale, purely on volume grounds, but Musberger beats Patrick for Worst Announcer because Patrick retains just enough residual professionalism to occasionally correct his mistakes.<\/p>\n There are good play-by-play guys out there, even on major tv networks. Mike Tirico is terrific, Joe Buck does a good job, several of ESPN’s second-string announcers are solid. Musberger is a complete travesty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brent Musberger is the single worst announcer in sports. “That’s a bold assertion,” you say. “I find that hard to believe. I mean, he’s famous.” Allow me to explain: Musberger generally calls games for ABC as part of a two-man announcing team. Musberger is the “play-by-play” guy, and the other member of the team, the… Continue reading Fundamentals of Sports Announcing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}