The Perfect Sport for TV

(originally written for ALARM Magazine in January 2007)

I love football.

As a guy who was never really into any sports as a kid, this is realization took me a long time to fully understand. I used to hate the kids in my homeroom with their NCAA basketball pools and their clean, white baseball caps promoting various sports franchises. It was antithetical to everything I thought was cool. Punk rock bands, confusing left-wing political philosophers, obscure poets and filmmakers… those people were cool. What they were doing was important. Sports? What good had they ever done anyone?

But now, I love football. I can’t get enough. I’ve been a casual fan for a number of years, but in the last two years it’s just gotten out of hand. I get giddy in August when the preseason starts. I watch every game on Sunday. When the playoffs come, I’m actually kind of upset that the season will be over soon

Most of what I love about football is, of course, the intellectual and physical attributes of the game itself. On one level you have this immensely complex chess match between the coaches and players of each team. On another level, you have the biggest, fastest, strongest men on the planet running into each other as hard as they can. But, this is not all of what makes it so much damn fun to watch. There are numerous factors that make football truly the perfect sport for television.

First of all, football visually makes sense from the perspective of a TV camera. The field fits well into a TV aspect ratio, unlike the awkward diamond of a baseball field. The action moves from left to right and back again. Following the play involves only an uncomplicated pan of the camera. Football’s huge, sprawling arenas make the game feel bigger and leave lots of room for multiple angles, as opposed to a more claustrophobic indoor space such as a basketball court.

The game is also convenient to TV in terms of timing. The action starts and stops, leaving time in between for analysis, as well as instant replays, which revolutionized sportscasting when they debuted in the telecast of the Army/Navy game in 1963. The flow of the action, of course, also leaves plenty of time for commercials to ensure they generate enough revenue for the network. But, beyond just the stop-start nature of football’s timing, it works out that each play has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As a play develops, an exciting narrative unfolds in seconds, contributing to the larger narratives of quarters, halves, games, seasons and careers.

The fantastic story element of football is also why it lends itself to commentary. Sports commentators originated in the days of radio, when announcers would call games from windowless rooms, recreating a fictional version of the action based on wire reports coming in on teletype. Among these announcers was Ronald Reagan, who became famous in the 1930’s for his ability to make up all the details of an exciting game live on the air without ever actually being on the field. Incidentally, this is not altogether dissimilar from how he ran the country in the 1980s, but once again, I digress…

Today, the cast of characters that calls NFL football games is a colorful sideshow worthy of observing even if you’re not the biggest fan of the game. There’s the outlandish antics and outfits of the NBC pre-game crew including Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson. My girlfriend has a fascinating theory that a seething, intense hatred of Troy Aikman exists just below the surface of Joe Buck’s snide eye-rolling. And then there is the king of ridiculous football commentary, John Madden.

Madden is so much fun to watch because if he wasn’t already established as such a big name in sports, there is absolutely no way anyone would let this man speak on television. I’m in the camp that believes Madden is a brilliant football mind, and somewhere in that huge head everything he says makes total sense. But what actually comes out of his mouth are these fascinating, inane, zen koans.  

So, with football season over for now, I leave you with three of my favorite John Madden quotes from actual Monday Night Football games. Even if you’re not the biggest football fan, I hope you can at least laugh at the absurdity that is John Madden, and the fact that he undoubtedly made more money while you were reading this than you will make in the next 5 years.

• “Hey, the offensive linemen are the biggest guys on the field, they're bigger than everybody else, and that's what makes them the biggest guys on the field.”

• “Don't worry about the horse being blind, just load the wagon.”

• “That’s why you can’t let out all your hose ‘til you know where the fire is.”