Rating the College Football Broadcasts
The college football broadcasts give us a mixed bag of excellent and horrible — here are the network’s rankings
This past weekend was the final smorgasbord in a season long feast of College Football in 2014. The new playoff format has clearly enhanced the viewing experience, giving fans plenty to talk about all week long between games and ramping up the hype machines more than ever before. It’s been a fun ride – every week all season long contained big matchups with playoff implications. It’s time to take a look at the broadcast and production teams deployed by each network and assess who did it right for Conference Championship Weekend, and who still has work to do.
1. CBS
CBS continues to set the gold standard in sports programming. The ratings for the SEC Championship Game were a bit down (7.7 overnight this year vs 8.7 for last year’s game), but that probably had more to do with the inevitability of the outcome. Seriously, did anyone expect Missouri to make this a competitive game against Alabama?
Events: SEC Championship Game, Mountain West Conference Championship Game
Positives: The entire crew is solid. They have mastered the art of enthusiastically capturing and conveying the drama and excitement of the event itself without letting an ostentatious personality overwhelm the viewer with mere yelling. It’s easy to tell when an announcer is manufacturing synthetic excitement (see below for more details). The most important jobs a play by play announcer and color analyst have are to tell the viewer what happened, and why it happened. Be mindful of the audience, and talk to them – don’t just talk to hear the sound of your own voice. Give us the down and distance and time left on the clock regularly. Vern Lundquist is an old pro at telling the story of what’s happening in the game without letting his ego get in the way. The viewer rarely has questions about the game situation. Gary Danielson has pointed opinions, but as a color analyst he excels at breaking down the intricacies of
the game in a way that is digestible to the fan watching from home. Together, they may not have a ton of sizzle, but there’s no question that they deliver the goods consistently and on time. The rest of the team does a thorough job of reporting the important information, presenting the drama in a compelling form for the viewer, and finding the backstories that keep the fan’s interest.
Negatives: Though he’s still keeping it together, Vern Lundquist is as old as Yoda. Some day sooner than later he’s bound to start slipping (like remarking that USC firing Lane Kiffin was a surprise – really??). The pregame and halftime crew, like the live announcing crew, relies on professionalism over personality to keep the fan’s interest, but they could do a better job of telling the whole story in the entire college football landscape.
2. ABC/ESPN
Events: ACC Championship Game, College Football Playoff Selection Show
The ESPN conglomerate continues to envelop the entire sports universe, so a critique of them is almost unfair – with that much exposure, it’s easy to nitpick. Then again, they created the exposure, thereby putting the pressure on themselves to offer up a consistently good product. They mostly succeed, but a few changes have not worked this year, and it really showed up in the ACC Championship Game.
Positives: Much like CBS, the ABC/ESPN crew does a solid job of capturing the drama of the event. The video production is particularly well done, with well timed crowd shots, sideline shots and coach reaction views to spice up the action on the field. The production crews clearly do a ton of prep work in the week leading up to the game, lining up interviews, news, strategies and stories of interest for the weekend production. Kirk Herbstreit does a very good job of explaining why strategies unfold the way they do in the game (even if you’re from Ohio State, you have to acknowledge the professional job he does). Their play by play teams are good, but …
Negatives: Chris Fowler clearly loves college football. Chris Fowler is a true professional. Chris Fowler was an outstanding ‘studio’ host on College Football Gameday who deftly captured the building drama as gametime approached. Chris Fowler is not an effective play by play man. It’s too bad – one finds oneself rooting for him to be a good live announcer, but it just never comes together. This is one of ESPN’s misses when it comes to effective deployment of talent. It seems as if they were hoping that Fowler’s celebrity and personality would be enough in the booth. It’s not. (This is a constant problem at ESPN, but that’s for another article). A play by play announcer doesn’t have to yell at the top of his lungs every time something big happens in the game. Think back to the glory days of Keith Jackson – he would modulate the volume based on the game action, but he would never yell. For him it was much more important to maintain the proper cadence – which is a masterful speaking style that keeps an audience constantly engaged. Fowler has not developed this ability, and compensates by overdoing it on the yelling.
3. FOX Sports
Events: Pac 12 Championship Game, B1G Championship Game
Fox Sports is the new kid on the block, but they have been doing college football games for long enough that they should have overcome the
inexperience by now. They haven’t. As good a job as they do on their NFL broadcasts, they remain completely tone deaf when it comes to intercollegiate athletics. The best example of this is their stubborn reliance on personality over ability that is personified by Erin Andrews. Erin Andrews is a very good sideline reporter, and while at ESPN she did solid feature pieces to contribute to weekend college football broadcasts. As a studio host, however, she is a disaster. Fox Sports refuses to find talent that fits the proper role in its studio broadcasts.
Positives: Fox clearly dedicates plenty of resources to their productions. They seemingly have more camera angles than other networks, more reporters, and more ability to tell compelling stories. Charles Davis, despite his weird, grating voice, does a solid job of providing color analysis that is understandable and relevant.
Negatives: If you think Chris Fowler yells a lot, wait till you get a load of Gus Johnson. It’s really impossible to do him justice in a critique. Suffice it to say, he is about as far away from the good old days of Keith Jackson as one could possibly imagine. He makes Brent Musberger seem like a monk on a vow of silence. (For the record, for all the old man creepiness of Musberger, he actually does a decent job of cadencing his play calling.)
The play by play guy shouldn’t make the audience bust out laughing at his performance. Gus Johnson is like an actor on Saturday Night Live caricaturing Gus Johnson. It’s not certain that he exists other than as a computer algorithm of a self indulgent announcer. The idea of Gus attempting to describe a formation, a zone defense or pass blocking technique is just too much to imagine. Really, though, Johnson is merely a symptom of a system wide disconnect at Fox Sports.
It even affects seasoned veterans like Tim Brando. Several times during the Pac 12 Championship Game, Brando made pronouncements about strategy employed by Oregon that made it appear as though he’d never seen a Pac 12 game. This was disappointing, but it was mystifying coming from an old pro who’s done college games for years. For instance, on Oregon’s third drive in the first quarter, already uncharacteristically having had to settle for two field goals, Oregon chose to go for it on 4th and goal from the 5.
Anyone who’s ever seen an Oregon game was wondering why they hadn’t already chosen to go for the TD on 4th down on the previous drives, but Brando found going for it on the third drive confusing and questionable. Although they provide multiple camera angles, Fox does a poor job of in game production. They do nothing to enhance the drama of the moment with sideline reaction shots or other camera techniques. There’s something in the culture at Fox that needs to be blown up and rebuilt.
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