I know. This is not a sports column and I am not a sports writer. If you came here looking for social or political commentary this week, I apologize.
There is something from the sports world that I do not feel I can go without discussing, and it could be categorized as media criticism, making it appropriate outside of the sports pages.
Saturday’s broadcast of the Ohio State-Penn State football game was one of the most despicable episodes of bias and favoritism I have ever witnessed, and I occasionally watch Fox News.
ABC’s broadcasters, Tim Brant and Ed Cunningham, espoused stupidity and distortions at such a dizzying rate, that I could not tell who was saying what. No reasonable person could comprehend it, let alone attribute it. Therefore, for the purposes of this column, I will combine them into one entity, which I shall call “Brantingham.”
From the beginning of the game, it was painfully obvious that Brantingham wanted Penn State to win the game. When Joe Pa was going on one of his senility-induced rants on one of the referees, Brantingham remarked with absolute conviction that Joe Pa is “never wrong” on these things. Really? Joe Pa has never been wrong? How about when he accosted a referee last season?
However, Brantingham was more than willing to point out the mistakes of the refs when Ohio State was the beneficiary.
They also showed footage of a Penn State pep rally with a confused Joe Pa babbling into a microphone as evidence of the great legacy of Joe Pa and Penn State football.
No mention that this leadership has yielded a 2-7 record for Penn State this year. You would have thought Penn State was the defending national champion.
The saddest attempt by Brantingham to make a coherent point was his OSU scoring drive tirade.
He said if you take away OSU’s scoring drives, then Penn State is winning the game. At first I thought I was hearing things. But then he repeated himself over and over again. I will repeat it as well, as it demands repeating: If you take away OSU’s scoring drives, then Penn State is winning.
Well no s–t, Dick Tracy! Do you mean to tell me that if you take away the points scored by one team, the other team would likely be winning? It is a surprise the Oxford debating society has not sought Brantingham to join its team.
Continuing this exercise in logic, a graphic was presented to the home viewer on OSU’s failed drives. This brilliant piece of work let us know that all of OSU’s failed drives (i.e. the ones that did not result in a score) ended in either a punt or a turnover.
Now I have only been watching football my entire life, so I may be mistaken, but if a team does not score on a drive, the result is always a punt or turnover. Were we supposed to be impressed with the fruit of this guy’s investigative journalism skills?
Hey, if we took away all of Penn State’s scoring drives, it would have been a shutout.
I am typically not one to rant about sports announcers. I know most of them are illiterate goons. Yet these guys stirred up a lot of anger in me.
The memory so lingered, that at midnight – after drinking 15 beers – I was able to fill the front and back of an envelope with notes on Brantingham, all from recollection.
The commentary was so bad that the incomprehensible happened: I began to wish that Brent Musburger was calling the game. That quickly passed.
Erik Johns is a senior in journalism. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
