Al Michaels works the ref

John Madden did good work last night, I thought.

Al Michaels, on the other hand, was just disgraceful. More and more I cannot stand the man. He better understands make-up for television lighting than he does NFL rules and strategy, and there are long stretches of time when he literally has nothing of value to offer.

He has a good voice and I like to hear it when he's recapping the facts, as play-by-play men are tasked to do. But the more he strays from straight-up summary of the action on the field, the more he embarrasses himself. He opens his mouth to say all kinds of immature, pointless, and stupidly inflammatory comments about the role of the officiating in the NFL game. The play-by-play guy, especially one working for a national audience, should be more detached and wise; Michaels has turned into an evil hybrid of Robin Leach and any loudmouth partisan talk-show radio host.

There was about 120 plays in the game and 7 penalties, and he talks and talks and talks about the penalties. The Dolphins bungle a probably pointless request for review, and he immediately flames up into indignation like this decides the outcome of the game and it's all the fault of the zebras. This approach to the game is more simple-minded than blaming a loss on the placekicker who shanks a hail-mary 50-yard field goal with time expiring. He peddles cheap outrage, and it's a terrible education he's providing for young fans.

It's one thing to comment on calls as they are made. But once the players and coaches move onto the next play, Michaels should restrain himself from babbling on like a whiny tit with such pompous certainty that he best understands how exactly the outcome of the game was or will be decided by this or that made or blown call. He pretends to know things that he can't know -- how, for example, the referees would rule on this or that replay, or how, for example, the referees would flag or not flag that play in some hypothetical other reality.

Silence is golden, Al, when you have no intelligent comment to offer. Working the refs is bush league, and people need to tell him this.

... Clay brings up another valid criticism of Michaels' work. Every game he makes some kind of not-sly allusion to the Vegas point spread on the game, and he always does this with the greatest naivete and gullibility, like the point spread is God's measure of the relative value of teams. I'll spare confused novices my lecture about what the point spread is and what the point spread is not, since, while Michaels' great respect for the spread is supremely annoying, the stupidity of it detracts from the professional/ethical questions it raises: here one of the NFL's #1 representatives routinely encourages gambling on the game. He routinely "handicaps" the match-up with the bait of bookies. Where there is smoke, there is often fire: people who know so much about the movement of the point spread sure sound like people who itch to place wagers. Does the NFL want one of the top primetime play-by-play jobs occupied by someone who gambles, appears to gamble, or (at least) encourages gambling on the outcome of the game he calls?