New NFL broadcast crews will make for an interesting season

Change can be a good thing, and in the NFL – a league that changes rules and networks more… Change can be a good thing, and in the NFL – a league that changes rules and networks more often than Jerry Jones changes his prosthetic head – change is on the horizon for sports fans in TV land.

After 36 years on ABC, Monday Night Football has moved up the dial to ESPN. ABC made sure to make a big deal out of this at the close of last season’s abysmal MNF run, but it was understandably difficult for them to overcome the bloated pomp and circumstance they’ve so painstakingly (and painfully) injected into the broadcast over recent years.

While Madden and Michaels did their damnedest to make it seem like the end of an era, MNF was such an over-hyped, self-celebratory farce of itself by the end that the whole thing was difficult to take seriously, especially considering that our Monday-night matchups would only be moving from one Disney-owned network to another.

If anything, it only meant a more palatable start time (8:30) and no more embarrassing Tim McGraw highlight reels at halftime.

So Monday Night moves to ESPN, where it’ll be tended to by Mike Tirico, Joe Theismann and everybody’s favorite crotchety hater, Tony Kornheiser. While it pains me to see the breakup of what was the best commentating crew in football – ESPN’s pairing Paul McGuire and Mike Patrick with Theismann on Sunday nights – and while this team seems mostly like a question mark, it’s good that things have been legitimately shaken up on Monday nights.

The aforementioned Sunday night broadcast, formerly MNF’s little brother, has also moved, this time from ESPN to NBC, which recently came to the realization that the Triple Crown and occasional hockey games do not a sports division make. And oh how they have bounced back. Rather than decide who might make a good commentary team for Sunday Night Football, NBC ultimately decided to just hire everybody.

Sunday Night will be manned by a team so primed for unintentional comedy it’s almost hard to believe. The combination of Al Michaels and John Madden will be preserved, but rather than leave it to that awkward, inoffensive power duo, NBC decided to throw in Chris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis and Bob Costas, who is normally kept in the NBC Rainbow Room’s basement, chained to a wall, only to be shown the light of day once every two years for the Olympics, when they pump him full of methamphetamines or whatever the NFL has Rich Eisen on and make him work 22-hour days for a few weeks.

This should work out perfectly. Madden and Michaels will be their usual selves, but less time will be spent dwelling on who on the field is one of Madden’s “favorite guys.” Between Collinsworth and Costas, you’ll have the smartest football analyst and most charismatic sports broadcasters in the business, respectively.

I can see it now. Madden will say something incredibly obvious, Collinsworth will augment it with something Madden won’t be able to decipher to save his life and Costas will take jabs at both of them so smart that Madden won’t notice at all and Collinsworth will become increasingly consumed with envy and hatred as the season progresses. Ultimately, Michaels will bring it all back around to sanity the same way that one guy in your group of friends has a knack for breaking up fights between your resentful, drunken roommates before the situation escalates.

He’ll send it down to Jerome at the sideline, who we’ll see standing there, in glorious high definition, still clutching the Lombardi trophy; he’ll yell, “Everybody on Earth still loves me! Back to you, Al.” This will be business as usual for the Sunday-night team.

Of course, that approach will only work until December, by which point Collinsworth, in an ego-driven rage, will show up at every broadcast armed to the teeth, just waiting for Costas to make a crack about the Bengals so he can completely snap on the air in a way that’ll make Howard Cosell’s last run look like a graceful mosey into the sunset.

So for those of you who lament change in the NFL and the fall of Monday Night Football, I’ll leave you with this challenge: Just you try to tell me you miss Tim McGraw and Hank Williams when you find yourself watching a completely unhinged Chris Collinsworth try to choke Bob Costas during a primetime sporting event – in high definition. Think about that.

Are you ready for some football?

Dan Richey is the managing editor of The Pitt News.