Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [327]
I listened to my good friend Mitch Albom, who was in that trouble in Detroit where he quoted a couple of guys and said that they were at a game and they didn’t actually get to the game, and I defended Mitch for this because he’s my dear friend and because I believe in his position. I said, “Do you read what’s written?” And he goes, “No, because I don’t want to have to change any friends.” I don’t google myself, and I didn’t read things specific to Monday Night Football. I had a sense that there was a lot of criticism. I told people, “You can gather all this stuff and put it in a box and I’ll read it at the end of the season.” But I never read a word.
MIKE TIRICO:
Tony is brilliant. I enjoy watching Tony work. I enjoyed working with Tony, I really did. I learned a lot. Tony has been incredibly successful in places where you come to hear Tony’s opinion on something, like his column or PTI. You come for Tony’s opinion. To me, you come to a football game for the football game. The football game is surrounded by a bevy of wide-ranging opinions in the pregame shows, the postgame shows, the talk shows during the week. People come to the game for the game itself. So it’s trying to take what Tony does best—strong, interesting, intelligent, and timely opinions on people in the game—and make that work within the body of the game.
That was the challenge, and I’m going to tell you, it pisses me off that people will look at those three years and say, “Well, it wasn’t that good.” Or they’ll say, “Oh, Christian Slater was on.” If you took all the non-football people who were on—although anybody who worked on the show will tell you I was not a huge fan of it—at most 2 percent of our three years of Tony or two years of having “celebrities” in the booth, 2 percent of our broadcast was that. The other 98 percent was football or football content. So I think people have done an incredible disservice of overdramatizing the impact that had on the broadcast.
The problem working in the booth was that you’re trying to cover the game, and then you’re trying to get Tony’s opinion on the stuff that’s going on. We were the only football show that was nominated for an Emmy three years in a row. So I still stand on that merit; the show was not the be-all and end-all, trust me, but the shows we did were pretty good football shows.
The challenge day to day, hour to hour, play to play, was that a play happens on the field, right in front of us, and we’re so used to watching TV—“Here’s a play, here’s a replay, here’s what happened”—but Tony couldn’t add to what just happened. He could add to the person and give it some definite context, but the viewer has become conditioned to hear someone say what happened.
The brilliant success of Madden over the years was that he turned a lot of viewers into wannabe defensive coordinators. Nobody could draw up a chalkboard and do all this stuff and squeeze x’s and o’s inside the twenty seconds between a play until Madden. I think that’s just become the way that job is measured. So having a non-football guy in one of those traditional seats was just hard for people to get used to.
I absolutely love the fact that for eighteen years I’ve worked for a place that is willing to try something different. We see people do the same TV over and over, and it gets very stale. Who would’ve been ridiculous enough to put SportsCenter on live in the morning? Who would’ve been silly enough to put two columnists on TV carrying on their in-the-hallway conversations? Who would’ve been silly enough to do all these different shows we’ve done over the years? Well, guess what? More ideas we’ve had as a company work. And this was an attempt to say, you know what, football is done the same way by everybody, can we add something? Can we make it broader and better? Because at the end of