Don't Ever Watch NBC's "Football Night In America"

It's their pregame show for "Sunday Night Football." It features Bob Costas, Peter King, and Keith Olberman reviewing highlights of all the afternoon's NFL action. And it's absolutely atrocious. Costas is Costas- I like him a lot during the Olympics, but could do without him pretty much any other time. He makes for a capable frontman but gives off a very strong "bored" vibe. That's a bad thing. If I'm handing out grades, which I am, he gets a C-. King is King- he's actually a lot more tolerable on screen than in print. On "Football Night in America," he spends less time than usual cooing about Brett Favre and Tom Brady and more time just giving analysis, which is obviously a step in the right direction. Still, he doesn't mesh with Costas or Olberman at all. Whenever they defer to him it sounds like his voice is being piped in from a different sound stage and neither of the other guys ever engages him in dialogue. I'll give him a C, but that's only because today he managed to go a whole half hour without calling Brady or Favre "adorable."

Olberman, however, is the real reason I'm making this post. (Grade: F) I guess you could say he's lost a step. In my wistful mind, he'll always be paired alongside Dan Patrick and offering quippy one-liners while calling highlights on Sportscenter as he did five nights a week until 1997. He was fantastic back then. Now? He's completely intolerable. They hired him to do exactly what he used to do; narrate highlights while adding a couple funny one liners here and there. Today, there were two key problems with his attempts to do so. 1) He couldn't keep up with the highlights, and didn't seem to know what was going on in many of them. 2) He was completely and totally unfunny. Here's one example that stuck with me because of how bad it was. During the New Orleans/Arizona game, at one point Kurt Warner fumbled while standing in the pocket. Saints LB Scott Shanle recovered and returned the ball. Olberman:

And the ball is picked up by Shanle! It's a "Shanle Production!" *pause* If anyone gets that reference, I'll buy them something.

If your references are self-admittedly obscure, you suck at your job as a highlight narrator. This one is so obscure I couldn't even decipher it with the help of Google. There's a writer/director somewhere out there named John Patrick Shanley, who is credited on imdb.com as having a hand in 12 Hollywood productions since 1987 (less than half of which I had heard of). That's my only guess as to who Keith was talking about. If it's correct, that's the lamest shit ever. Olberman and this Shanley guy have to be close friends or something. If it's not correct, then congratulations are in order for Keith. He made a completely and totally indecipherable reference, on national television no less. America appreciates his efforts. And of course, that's just one example. There were many others that were much easier to understand and still fucking stupid. What happened, Keith? Where have you gone? Has becoming a smarmy political commentator robbed you of your ability to tell me what's happening during a football game without sounding like a jackass?

I know, I know- it's not like there are a lot of options when it comes to highlight shows like this one. If you spent Sunday afternoon anywhere but on your couch or in a sports bar, you need to get caught up somewhere as soon as you get home from wherever. All I'm saying is, don't do it on NBC. If you feel like you can't put up 30 minutes of Chris Berman on ESPN's "The Blitz," just go to ESPNews. Those anchors are the JV guys- they're not yet full enough of themselves to try and upstage the highlights with awful jokes. They're just there to calmly say what happened. I speak only for myself, but that's all I'm ever looking for anyways.