*Watching the Florida-Oklahoma national championship game on TV last week was more than tense. It was also frustrating. Fox Sports doesn’t typically do college football, and it was glaringly obvious.
Play-by-play man Thom Brennaman and color analyst Charles Davis were awful. Chris Myers on the sideline made viewers pine for Erin Andrews, who at least hustles. Recruiting Joe Buck from pro football and baseball would have been the way to go.
Brennaman was criticized for his game-long canonization of Tim Tebow, but we can forgive that. Tebow is that refreshingly unique. Think Roger Staubach and Bill Bradley back in the day. Only more so.
But not explaining penalties and losing track of the down was downright disgraceful. Stating the obvious has never qualified as analysis. That’s what buddies in a sports bar are for. The Bright House Sports Network guys who do the local high school games are better. And they aren’t that good.
The good news is that this was the last BCS championship game for Fox. Next year ABC has it and then it goes to ESPN.
The potential bad news – for Gator fans who envision a repeat – is that next year’s big game will be at the Rose Bowl. That would be a de facto home game for the University of Southern California, a team that many observers expect to make it that far in 2009.
*The sobering saga of Charlie Strong, UF’s highly-regarded defensive coordinator, continues. He has the coaching credentials, the track record, the respect of his players and peers, the unwavering gratitude and loyalty of Urban Meyer — and no head coaching offers. Those of lesser stature and accomplishment have leapfrogged Strong and taken such jobs.
Charlie Strong is black. Is it racism? Almost assuredly. With a taboo subplot.
There are only a handful (actually seven) of black major college football head coaches. When UF offensive coordinator Mike Mullen recently took the Mississippi State job, a position for which Strong wasn’t even interviewed, the whispering campaign grew notably disquieting.
But the outgoing MSU head coach, Sylvester Croom, was also black.
But Croom didn’t have a white wife, as Strong does. As does prominently successful, black University of Buffalo coach Turner Gill, who had hoped to be hired last month by Auburn. It didn’t happen. The less-than-subtle message: It’s still impossible for certain universities, especially in the South, to countermand the wishes of their good-old-boy booster networks that still draw their own racial lines in the 21st century.
More than a few pundits have noted the irony of college football’s coach-hiring racism in the context of the election of this country’s first African-American president.
Frankly, however, we probably wouldn’t be referencing the upcoming inauguration for its historic significance if Barack Obama had married somebody more like his Kansas mother and grandparents. We have a ways to go yet.
*After the long-awaited, much-ballyhooed national championship game that was the Florida-Oklahoma battle, anything else, including a Tampa game with Roman numerals and a global TV audience, now seems anti-climactic. Especially when one of the teams, Arizona or Philadelphia, will come in with seven losses or six losses and a tie, respectively. Super? Maybe this is the Parity Bowl.
And if the other team is Baltimore? We’ll see a lot of Lakeland’s Ray Lewis – and be reminded that he could, instead, (had it not been for his obstruction-of-justice plea bargain) be doing time for his role in that (still unsolved) Atlanta murder-case fiasco of 2000.
*The “peoples’ business”: As if U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., didn’t have enough to do with all his grandstanding for Roland Burris as the next junior senator from Illinois. He also found time to weigh in on the BCS national championship game. Actually, he did more than rhetorically lobby.
He has co-sponsored a bill that would prohibit any person to “promote, market or advertise” a post-season game as a national championship unless it is the final game of a postseason playoff system. And, yes, it has been sent to committee.