I like Millen, but the guy doing play by play kinda sucked. Not that I want a play by play guy to be filling up every second of the game with babble about what celebrities are in attendance, but they should be at least as on the ball as fans at home as far as recognizing fumbles and such. There was at least one occasion where the players were in a big scrum and players on both sides are making the universal sign for "we recovered the ball", and I'm sitting there wondering, how long is it gonna take this guy to realize the ball is loose? No matter what the problems with it are, I really wish I got that channel. I got a real kick out of the amount of time they spent advertising the Red Zone channel, they knew very well that all of us in New York getting screwed by Cablevision were watching.
One problem is that you have a Giants announcer and homey (Bob Papa) calling a Jets game. He showed as much enthusiasm as Michael Kay would announcing a Mets game.
Didn't NFLN have Bryant Gumbel doing play-by-play the first year? He has a voice like Mickey Mouse and it got lost behind the crowd noise, etc. Papa is an improvement over him, but he does give a game that pre-season feel.
my problem with the broadcast was the amateurish zooming and shot selection primarily. The late calls annoyed me, and for my time-warner HD WPIX feed, there was BAD lip flap during the pregame - thats tv broadcasting amateur hour right there, but it could possibly have come from further down the stream, so I'm not really comfortable passing judgement there. The announcers need more practice, otherwise they were great, liked the color, liked how they got the trivia in, etc.
Papa and Millen did correctly call every replay result before it happened. Usually when there's that many they get at least one wrong.
Yeah. It did feel kinda flat. I'm sure doing the game from Canada didn't help. And being a Jets/Bills game ...yawn. Hey, it could be worse. Tony Kornheiser could be on their air staff.
agreed. awful camera work too. Not to mention you have to own a satellite to view it non-locally. Fuck em.
I don't think the pre-season feel was all the network's fault. First of all it's a Thursday night game in Toronto, that has pre-season written all over it. And with that you get a crowd that isn't a home field crowd, that adds to it as well. You can say there were X amount of Bills or Jet fans there but it isn't the same. Bills fans, like all fans, have their own parking spots, tailgates, own seats--that didn't exist for this game, gives it a totally different, unfamiliar vibe throughout the stadium.
