Monday Night Fumble
The painful decline of the ABC game.

By Geoffrey Norman, NRO sports writer
November 22-25, 2001

onday night the professional football game that once seasoned the blandest evening of the week ran for three and a half hours, including some 20 penalties and probably more commercials than that. Parsifal would have seemed brisk and springy by comparison. Fidel Castro, giving a speech, would have come off as terse. Bill Clinton, in an interview, as laconic.

This was wretched football between one of the two teams to reach the Super Bowl last year as well as the team it had to beat to get there. The loser of that last game won this time. But it didn't take much. The New York Giants — a team of highly paid professionals — got called for what must have been a half-dozen motion penalties. They were playing in the Minnesota Viking's place and the fans were loud. The Giants, poor things, couldn't hear their quarterback when he called signals, so they moved early.

Well, two nights earlier, I sat in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium where the University of Florida Gators play their home football games. Gator fans like to refer to their stadium as "the Swamp," and they make it hostile territory for any team with the temerity to come there and play. On Saturday night, that team was the hated Seminoles of Florida State. The noise was enough to give you not just a headache, but a concussion. Florida State played a freshman at quarterback. But he didn't flinch and Florida State got called for exactly one motion penalty.

The (very) highly paid professionals who labor for the New York Giants, however, couldn't master the silent count.

There were fumbles. Interceptions. A lot of "look at me, ain't I just wonderful" hot-dogging and strutting by players who had just caught a pass or made a tackle — done the job they are paid to do, in other words. Randy Moss, the mercurial but talented Viking's receiver got flagged 15 yards for taunting. His team was 3-5 going into the game. At the end of the game, there was a fight and a couple of players got tossed. Probably, they were relieved to escape.

It was a dog of a game. I don't know what kind of ratings it got. Until someone gives me a job reviewing television, I don't plan to spend any time researching TV ratings or trying to understand how they are arrived at. But I do know that Monday Night Football ratings have been going down and that the game is not the benchmark event it once was.

On call-in sports radio, the football fanatics cry out that the broadcasters are to blame. They want to clean house and bring in new talent. Announcer Al Michaels, former quarterback Dan Fouts, and hip comic Dennis Miller are the talent. They do a little celebrity name dropping; Miller especially, who likes to throw first names around, as when he referred to "Tommy" Hanks. (That would be the guy who played the schoolteacher/company commander in Saving Private Ryan.) They tend to force a few jokes, especially at the end of the broadcast when the game has been decided and everyone is just waiting for the clock to run down. Miller's attempts at intellectually comic boldness can be a little tiresome and frequently fall flat. But all this is bearable. And if you can't bear it, you can do what I often do and hit the "mute" button. What was not bearable — or forgivable — was inviting Regis Philbin into the broadcast booth, a few weeks ago, and allowing him to say a few things about football. (He likes Notre Dame.)

ABC would like to pump up the show-biz values of the broadcast. This is what Miller is there to do. Get the non-football fan, the people who have seen Miller on HBO, to watch. And maybe, the network brains must be thinking, we can get some of the Kathie Lee crowd by giving Regis a cameo. But like the people who call the radio talk shows to rave about how the broadcasters are ruining the show, the producers at ABC are missing the point.

The show-biz component is okay. It is nowhere near as hard to watch as, say, The Today Show. Or Diane Sawyer. The fluff is fine. It's the game that is the problem. And the game's problems — a lot of them, anyway — are caused by television.

Time outs are called strictly so the networks can sell beer and tires (guy stuff) and while the viewers at home are going to the bathroom or the refrigerator, the players are standing around, waiting. Football is a game of rhythm and arbitrarily stopping the action, disrupts it. Instead of a seamless narrative, you get a lot of abrupt acts and long intermissions. Like those made-for-TV movies. You also get games that run about 45 minutes longer than they should. In a time when everybody is supposed to have a shorter attention span, why should we be expected to stick with a football game longer than we used to?

Two good teams, with a lot at stake, might be able to get past the distractions of TV time outs and put on a good game. But there aren't many good teams in the age of salary caps, free agentry, and a college draft that is designed to make every team in the league above average — to use Garrison Keillor's wonderful formulation. Lots of teams are 5-4, 6-3, 4-5, and 3-6 halfway into the season. Hardly anyone is out of the playoff picture. One or two teams (St. Louis and Oakland) are pretty good and a couple (Detroit and Arizona) are pretty bad. Everyone else is mediocre and when two average teams play, you will most likely get an average game. The score may be close — the game may even go into overtime — but that happens in high school, too. Close games and tight divisional races might be good for television but they do not necessarily translate into great football. The Giants vs. Minnesota was not — by a long way — Oakland/ Pittsburgh in the 70s. Or Dallas/Washington in the 80s.

And, then, because television is there with the cash — which they get from the people who pay for the commercials that run during the TV time outs — the players are paid tall money, win or lose. Moss just signed a $75 million contract and on this night, anyway, he played like he was worth it. But he has games when he can't be bothered, phones it in, and makes clear his disdain. There are still hungry players in the NFL but their hunger is psychic. A lot of the players are borderline complacent. The Minnesota players, especially, were not tackling with a lot of conviction Monday night. Even the broadcasters pointed this out and it is not in their self-interest to alert viewers to the fact that they are watching shoddy football.

This Monday Night might be better. One of the teams, at least, is way above average. The St. Louis Rams are to the offense what, oh, the old San Diego Chargers whose quarterback was Dan Fouts, now broadcasting for ABC, once were. The Rams will be playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, one of the league's many disappointing mediocrities, a team that is supposedly loaded with talent but that just can't seem to win more than half its games. The Bucs humiliated the Vikings a couple of weeks back but, week to week, the games between the average teams just don't mean very much.

Still, this is Monday night and the players are supposed to respond to the opportunity to perform in prime time. If the game is good, it won't make any difference who announces it. And if it's bad, it still won't. If it is a dog, a lot of fans — including this one — are going to turn off the television and find some other way to fill three and a half hours. Dennis, Dan, and Al will be just another late-night talk show, babbling into an empty night.

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