Media Watch

Play-by-play announcers annoy me with their repeated inanities.  Here are a few:

 

      1.  “He rushed for a buck twenty.”

I don’t know who came up with the clever substitution of a buck for a hundred.  It was cute the first time, maybe even the twentieth time.  But now we’ve hit, by my count, the 10,000 mark, or as they would phrase it, 100 bucks.

       2.  “They’re moving left to right.”

Really?  From whose left to whose right?  If a team is moving at all, doesn’t it have to be moving, from someone’s perspective, left to right?  And right to left?  Doesn’t that depend on where you are in relation to the ball?

If they want to give us a mental picture of direction, shouldn’t they say they’re moving north to south or east to west?

Not that anybody gives a damn which direction they’re going, except whether it’s into or away from the wind.

 

       3.  “He lost the handle.”

As if a football would have a handle.  How stupid is that?

 

      4.  “He climbed the ladder.”

Used to describe a quarterback’s movement in the pocket.

This is a Phil Simms “pet peeve” (Showtime’s Inside the NFL).  Simms, one of the rare articulate commentators, asks, “Is this a hardware store?”

      5.  “This game is over.”  When it clearly is not. 

Consider this excerpt:  “It’s over now.  New Orleans, with two-sixteen to go, has a four-point lead.  . . . That’s all she wrote, folks.”

Have these morons ever heard of a fumbled snap?  Do they think it’s impossible for Tom Brady to move a team 70 yards in a minute?  Of course, that’s what happened.

TV and radio commentators love to ridicule fans who exit the game early.  These are the same commentators who can’t wait to pronounce it over when the difference is less than a touchdown with two minutes on the scoreboard clock.

 

6.  “Now there’s twenty ticks on the clock.”

Really?  Swat them off of there before one of those ticks bites somebody.

 

         7.  “He caught the pass.  And dropped it.”

That confuses me.  If he caught the pass and dropped it, then I’m wondering if it was a fumble.

No, it was the announcer anticipating that the catch would be made and telling us something happened that did not.

It would be like a baseball announcer saying, “And that’s out number three” as the left fielder is still backing up to the wall.

Is it too much to ask you to wait until the catch is made before you call it a catch?