In addition to castigating the local spurts anchor he’s dubbed Babbling Bob Lobel, David Scott of Scott’s Shots — unwilling to spring for DirectTV’s “Sunday Ticket”, is left agog at the way New England’s terrestrial football audience was treated yesterday.
Here™s what happened at the Can™t Broadcast Straight network late Sunday afternoon: Following the early finish of the Patriots win over Buffalo (at about 3:45 p.m.), CBS switched to coverage of what happened to be one of the day™s most-compelling games (if not THE most) “ Atlanta and Pittsburgh (which the Falcons won on a field goal OT). The network noted that NFL rules prohibited them from showing that game beyond 4:15 (to œprotect the Fox broadcast of Indianapolis-Washington) and wond up having to leave the contest late in the 4th quarter with the game tied 38-38.
From the 15 minutes that remained in CBS™s broadcast window (leading up to the local airing of the Lobel-led œPatriots 5th Quarter), the studio foursome of James Brown, Dan Marino, Shannon Sharpe and Boomer Esiason (above) watched the live action on off-screen monitors and mostly failed to describe the game action, instead offering œooohs, œaaahs and a mish-mash of strained facial expressions.
No one “ including the suddenly shaky ex-Fox stalwart, Brown “ was able to keep viewers informed and the immediate tape-delay replays of game action that were shown were only made more confusing by the studio crew™s inability to focus and inform the viewers. It was everything you don’t want to do on live sports TV and everything you’d prefer to never see. It was just that painful to watch.
At one point during CBS™s catastrophe, Esiason tried to explain to his cohorts that the viewers at home weren™t seeing the game that his partners were watching and they should, you know, maybe try and remember they were ON TV and not WATCHING TV. Boomer’s plea fell on deaf ears.
If it wasn™t the worst pro football-related live television embarrassment since The Heidi Game, we™re going to have to be shown convincing evidence to dispute that notion.