![]() ![]() Michaels spent the past 16 seasons as the voice of NBC’s Sunday Night Football. 2022 begins his record 37th campaign as NFL primetime play-by-play announcer calling Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football. One of the most renowned sports broadcasters of all time and the commentator called “TV’s best play-by-play announcer” by the Associated Press, Michaels in Sept. In this role, he will broadcast and contribute across NBC Sports’ high-profile properties, including the NFL Playoffs and the Olympics. I hate his voice in a way that I could not have imagined possible to hate a person's voice had I never heard him speak.Iconic broadcaster Al Michaels, who joined NBC Sports in 2006 as the play-by-play voice of Sunday Night Football and played an integral role in the show becoming among the most-watched and most-honored shows in television history, was named to an emeritus role by NBC Sports Chairman Pete Bevacqua in May 2022. *Yes, I know most people think Buck is worse, but I'm practically in pain every time I have to hear Collinsworth speak. Sure, some are terrible from the start, but even those who start off as good announcers fall apart. They get dumbed down and forced into the typical announcer cliche boxes. I think it's pretty consistent that announcers come in at their best and then they devolve. Collinsworth was excellent and thoughtful in spite of having perhaps the worst announcing voice in history* at first but now he's good for one decent insight per game while spending the rest of the time fitting in perfectly with the crowd. Gruden was at least arguably good for a year and then became, well, we all know. Mayock and Collinsworth are pretty damn good, all in all.Īren't they always best when they first start?Īikman was a seriously good color guy who has turned into the announcing personification of blandness (which makes him better than most still. Very disappointing, and he does sound insane half the time. He showed his first year he could do the job well, and then backed off. Gruden needs to go away his first year I thought he was excellent and provided real analysis and criticism, but then he apparently realized he might want to be a coach again and started avoiding saying anything negative. CBS announcers are worse than Fox I've always been glad to be an NFC guy, because the AFC announcers have always struck me as far more annoying. In case you missed that, Dan Dierdorf sucks. I mean, everybody knows that, but now he sucks in a vaguely statistically-measured manner. This whole thing reinforces several of my views of the quality of NFL announcers: I'm genuinely impressed by him, and it's nice to see him getting some props here. Wow, I thought it was my undying fanboy love of Ronde Barber that made me think he was doing so well as an analyst. I'm glad that NBC, even as ratings have soared and the general hoopla around the game keeps getting bigger and bigger, has at least let Michaels and Collinsworth keep the actual football game more or less about football. *Play-by-play announcers had Howard Cosell, but that model wasn't really followed, except as it helped turned MNF into a more entertainment-heavy model. That mandate destroyed Jaworski's value in the booth. all try to be entertaining first and analyze.maybe. I'm going to shut up for a while" and then proceeded to do exactly that.) Guys like Gruden, Kornheiser, etc. (My father's favorite Madden moment remains the time Madden had been rambling on a la Dierdorf, then stopped, said something roughly equal to "I'm just blathering on and not making any sense. Except that Madden in his prime established the template because he was actually good at providing analysis, then making that analysis fun for the casual fan. Though "take plays off" should not be an infraction against play-by-play guys unless the reason they took the play off is that they were too busy yammering about something NOT the play on the field.īut I think the biggest problem with commentators is the one mentioned about Gruden, the "mandate to provide general entertainment." Ever since John Madden*, color commentators became part football analysts, part clown. (Though, I have to say, after watching the Seattle/NYG game yesterday, I can't help but think Burkhardt/Lynch is worse than advertised, even though I actually credited a stupid remark to Lynch when it was actually Burkhardt during the game.) Which one you'd prefer depends on how annoying you find his voice and how much listening to silence bothers you. ![]() It's not that he says things that are dead wrong or mind-numbingly stupid the way Dierdorf and Simms subject us to, it's just that dead silence would be equally informative analysis. That assessment of Aikman seems pretty much spot-on. ![]()
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