HEY, WHAT’S SO FUNNY? - MIKE IN DA - NOVEMBER 3, 2010

HEY, WHAT’S SO FUNNY? -

NFL PRE-GAME SHOWS


HAVE BECOME A


LAUGHING MATTER!


Written by: Mike in DA
Date posted: 11/3/2010

I’ve mentioned here several times before how useless NFL Pre-Game Shows are. In a previous post, I mentioned that those one hour shows on FOX and CBS every Sunday are about 48 minutes too long while ESPN’s two-hour NFL show on Sundays is about an hour and forty minutes too long.



Then last week here I mentioned all the giggling and laughing that John Lopez does on the SR610 Morning Show. Well, he’s not the only sports talker who does an inordinate amount of that.

Before settling in on Sundays for your 10-hour or so NFL fix, you might watch one of the hour-long pre-game shows on either FOX or CBS (both at Noon ET). You may have noticed that it seems that the hosts never stop laughing.

Well, that's not completely the truth, but an analysis by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) of the CBS and Fox pre-game shows during Week #5 of the NFL season shows that the hosts do spend a lengthy amount of time laughing - sometimes at nothing, sometimes at their own jokes, and  once in a while at things that are really funny.

I'm glad I'm not the only one bringing up the fact that NFL pre-game shows have become a place for over-laughing at things that really aren't funny. I thank The Wall Street Journal for actually doing a study of that annoying trend because if I did it, it wouldn’t have as much credibility as the WSJ.

In the WSJ study during Week #5 of the NFL season, laughter took up 142 seconds of the Fox NFL Sunday pre-game show or 11.6 percent of the time the host and four analysts were seen together. Terry Bradshaw, alone, laughed for 92 seconds. I was surprised to learn that the CBS NFL Today crew laughed only 43 seconds in Week #5. It must have been a slow week at CBS.

Almost everything on TV is exaggerated, especially those things aimed at guys. Pre-game shows have always been pointless (really, who watches them?). You have "analysts" who never have to be right and are getting paid big money to act like regular guys just laughing it up by talking football. What a fuckin’ great job!

I remember years ago when the pre-game show would start a half-hour before the game, and in many cases it was done through a local feed. And before that, it started when the game started, and the only insight you could get was a couple of paragraphs in the local newspaper. Now they talk and talk and talk and have replaced the weather man/girl as the "get paid for guessing" people. I don't watch it, unless if I catch a little while channel-surfing while waiting for the games to start.

If I'm home, I watch just about every game that is televised, and I would even watch the Bills play the Panthers, but I don't want to hear about the players' mothers, listen to a cliche fest, or a bunch of sports talkers making a quarter to a half-million dollars telling me a bunch of shit. If you want to know what is going on, watch the game, everything else is just a bunch of blah, blah, blah. It's the games, nothing but the games that are important. Everything else is needless, unnecessary, and just plain excessive.

The following two paragraphs are from the WSJ study done during Week 5:



“The amount of time they laugh, though, is what sets them apart. The five hosts on Fox's show—Curt Menefee, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Michael Strahan and Jimmy Johnson - had a combined laughing time of two minutes, 22 seconds. That's about 11.6% of the 20 minutes, 27 seconds they were shown on set together. Mr. Bradshaw was easily the laughing leader, going for about 92.4 seconds—including 2.5 seconds at the start of the show before anyone said anything.


The CBS crew - Greg Gumbel, Dan Marino, Bill Cowher, Shannon Sharpe and Boomer Esiason - only laughed for 43 seconds. That's about one-third as much chuckling as the group at Fox. CBS declined to comment. Fox Sports spokesman Lou D'Ermilio says, 'If we didn't tell the guys to stop they would laugh and crack jokes 100% of the time.'" END
Below is the amount of time the hosts on Fox's and CBS's NFL pre-game shows spent laughing when shown together on set during Week #5.*


FOX - SECONDS:
T. Bradshaw (92.4 s)
J. Johnson (76.1 s)
M. Strahan (75.9 s)
H. Long (46.8 s)
C. Menefee (43.7 s)
Total: 2 m, 22 s


CBS - SECONDS

B. Cowher (35.8 s)
D. Marino (31.5 s)
S. Sharpe (28.5 s)
B. Esiason (19.2 s)
G. Gumbel (1.5 s)
Total: 43 s

 *includes time laughing together

You can't be too surprised that these guys are having a good time on the job. You try getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend Sunday getting dressed up and talking about football for eight hours and even getting a nice catered lunch. See if you can stop laughing all the way to the bank. Even if you argue that money doesn't equal happiness, but to these guys, football does.

The only reason most of you never crack a smile at your jobs is because it doesn't involve sitting around a dozen TV monitors and watching the Red-Zone channel with four of your friends on a Sunday afternoon.

MIKE IN DA

HMW

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