Monday, September 15, 2008

Good Game

I just finished watching the first enjoyable Monday night football game in a long time.

The last few years, in spite of being a rabid NFL fan and fantasy football owner, I've watched very few Monday night games. Not only have the matchups frequently been poor, but the production of the game has been noticeably inferior to my favorite football network CBS.

Here's how I rank the networks based on the production value and the quality of guys in the booth/sideline:

5. NFL Network - The presentation of these games are a disaster; it's been amateurish.
4. ESPN - Two painful words: Tony Kornheiser. Actually I like Jawarski but their secondary group (Golic, Ditka, and Greenberg) is better in my opinion.
3. NBC - Excellent presentation but Al Michaels and John Madden are borderline excruciating. They also continue the years-long Monday Night tradition of being stingy with in-game stats. My theory is that NBC (and ABC before them) hates fantasy football-ers.
2. FOX - Fox rises to #2 on the strength of its talent in the booth (Troy Aikman and Joe Buck especially). Fox invented the score capsule (or "scoring bug") but has used the ugly banner-style graphic for the clock and scores for several years.
1. CBS - CBS has far and away the best information in their graphics, which update the stats every play. A true friend to fantasy football geeks. But more importantly, their commentators are the best, with three of my top five favorite pairs (Harlon/Gannon, Nants/Simms, and Enberg/Cross).

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