How would you improve sports broadcasts?

Homerism gets me, too. I don't like it at all.

 

I get tired of failed coaches who were booted out for NCAA violations ending up as commentators.

And no more Lou Holtstzzzz

 

Pauses are fine, but it's jarring when you don't have an announcer at all. The WWE Raw last week (yeah, not a real sport, whatever ... there's an announcer calling live action) when Jerry Lawler had his heart attack was like this. They shut down the commentary for the last two or three matches and it was just ... weird. Obviously, the commentary was missing, but there was no one there to pull together the action, the clips and whatever other nuggets the viewer needed to know. Good or bad, the announcer plays a vital role.
This is especially true in just about any sport except baseball. When the ball is getting passed around and numbers can sometimes be difficult to discern, it helps to have that narrating voice directing the action.

 

This.
I'd really like an end zone angle to show how a big play develops, where the defense collapses or disguises a coverage and trap the QB.
Mike Mayock can get on the Buck and McCarver bus as well. He makes my ears bleed.

 

Adding the game clock as a constant was something that should have been done years before Fox added it. I know I'm always checking the time and the score when I'm covering a game, why shouldn't I have the same information available at home.

Analysts: Get your head out of the playbooks and go to the chalkboards. Not in a Tim McCarver way where he needs to explain a double switch seven times over two half-innings, but, instead of just saying a team is in a Cover 2, take a minute to explain WTF it is. It's just as bad in basketball, where numbers have replaced familiar terms like center, power forward and point guard.

 

Never show baseball from the backstop. I want to see the pitch heading to home plate. I don't need some artsy look of the catcher and umpire from behind. ESPN and FOX have really started going to this two or three times a game, especially in a key count so you have no idea what the outcome is as its happening.

 

CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP

Thank you.

You don't play for the team. You can't use "we" and "they."

My color guy -- who used to coach half the players we now cover -- lets it slip every now and then, but it's because he used to be an assistant coach with that team when the current players were part of the program. He gets a pass, but even he covers himself.

 

One other thing in relation to the overhead cameras. I wish they'd go back to behind the goalposts when they show field goal attempts. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a kick is good if they show an angle behind the kicker.

 

TSN showed the Raonic/Blake match from the U.S. Open without announcers last month and I truly enjoyed it.
Made me wish for more announcer-less events.

 

Anything that keeps Rod Black off TV is a good thing.

 

The Fox replay showing (complete with sound effect) Akers' 63-yard field goal hitting the crossbar and going over was some of the best sports TV I ever saw.

 

More technology to show how the game unfolds, 22 camera, isos on players.

Eliminate crawlers/scrolls at bottom of the screen, oh so distracting.

More advertising on uniforms/stadiums, anywhere you put the stuff (see NASCAR), less commercial breaks.

More journalists announcers, less ex-jocks. We are way past the "you never played the game" stage.

For every Collinsworth (channeling Cosell "tell it like it is"), we get 20 Aikmans ("well that was a fine effort there, he just missed the catch").

What would the game be like with Bill James giving analysis?