We here at For The Win are all in on the ManningCast Monday Night Football broadcast. Peyton and Eli Manning and their guests are sublime. The broadcast is at once more entertaining AND more informative than pretty much any other broadcast.
Yet, as I watch, I can’t help but have two opposing thoughts:
First, why did it take this long for us to get something like this?
Second, the inevitably ubiquitous imitations may very well be wretchedly awful.
Let’s deal with the first point first. While the NFL has certainly deployed alternate broadcasts with some frequency, especially during the playoffs, the primary model for delivering football games has been, forever, that stilted broadcast that nobody, as far as I can tell, actually likes: Two suited guys in a booth, one sideline reporter, all of them speaking in bizarrely formal tones while managing to say very little that the average fan doesn’t already know.
There's probably a lesson to be learned that the Mannings are entertaining by just saying exactly what is going on with a play and not hiding observations under layers of jargon, overcomplications and random laughter. I'm not subtweeting anything except 70 years of broadcasts.
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) September 28, 2021
It’s all a vestige of when broadcasting sports began, and the games and people playing them were new, and watching television was something of an appointment event wherein families who could afford them expected it to feel elegant and important and the technology required it all to be fairly staid and straightforward.
We’re 80 years on and nobody really bothered to substantially re-think the formula. The advances in camera and production technology have provided all the innovation.
Let’s pause here to say that talking on live television is hard. Analyzing football games as they unfold takes years upon years of work. But, frankly, there are a lot of former NFL and college players who have done that work, and so few of them have truly delivered.
We all went bonkers when Tony Romo arrived in the booth and began calling out plays as they were about to happen but that skill is essential to football, particularly the quarterback position. That is, in so many ways, where the game is played. The athletes at the NFL level are all so talented, all so strong, all so well-coached that real mismatches are scarce. An offense has to disguise what it is doing. It has to diagnose what the defense is doing. It has to find openings by being one step ahead. Defenses, in turn, must anticipate and react. On and on and on. That, actually, is football.
it’s wild that the ManningCast is both better at teaching you about football AND more entertaining than the average NFL broadcast. Normally sports broadcasts try to do one or the other
— Rodger Sherman (@rodger) September 28, 2021
It’s just that for years upon years, none of the football players would say as much. I don’t know if they were told to dumb it down for a general audience, or if they felt like they were protecting the mystical secrets of their sport from those not in the club or what. But now that you can come to understand football with surprising clarity by following just a few Twitter accounts (start with the friends of our podcast, The Counter: @minakimes, @theStevenRuiz, @PFF_DLee, @pff_seth, @CoachVass, @QBKlass, @btrossler) the lack of actual information being delivered on broadcasts has become glaring.
It may very well be that by unchaining Peyton and Eli from the booth and all the strictures that have historically come with that format, ESPN has allowed them to talk about football the way the rest of us do in our living rooms or at the sports bar or on Twitter.
The difference being that they spent the better part of two decades playing QB in the NFL and can get LeBron James to come hang.
That makes for a very good show!
The problem now is the same people who’ve given us so many years of unimaginative television — and once made us listen to Jason Witten for an entire season of Monday Night Football — are now going to scramble to replicate the magic of the Manning Bros. and it may very well go quite poorly.
There’s no question that other athletes — in every sport — have the personality and insight to make a show like this work, but those broadcasts will need to be carefully cultivated around those specific personalities and tailored toward the intended audience. We’re probably not far off from a time when you’ll be able to watch your favorite team play while streaming a broadcast led by legends from that team.
There’s some reason to hope those can be an illuminating look at the people behind the sports we love, and that they’ll be honest about the way games are played.
But there’s more reason to fear that those efforts will either rely too heavily on the way sports has generally been shown and talked about on TV, or simply attempt to unimaginatively re-create a show built around two particular and charmingly peculiar brothers. And that won’t work, either.
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