f13.net forums - Steelers fan works at ESPN

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
July 20, 2025, 03:39:48 AM

we're back, baby

This is a picture I took late in the 4th quarter of the MNF game between the Jags and Steelers. I think the guy working the graphics was having a conniption. Also funny because of the expression on the winning coach's face. Forgot to post it yesterday :)

I saw that and laughed my ass off. I just think ESPN's graphics crew is struggling a bit. In the Steelers/Dolphins game last week, the first graphic they showed was one of those "this is a player and here's some stuff about him" graphic. It was just the shell/template, though, because the picture was just a shadow with a question mark and the text read something like "This is just generic text about a player shown when he does something."

I loled.

That's avatar material.

I gotta say if MNF is going to carry the same caliber of game all season, I'm glad I have class on Monday nights.

That Tony Kornheiser sure is one annoying gasbag. It's sad that he makes me pine for John Madden or the return of Dennis Miller (even if he is just a conservative stooge nowadays). Their B team (which did the second game of the introductory doubleheader) is miles better. Perhaps we can get ESPN to throw Jaworski and Kornheiser into a Thunderdome replication. I have faith that Jaws would win and rid TV of a personality more grating than Rosie O'Donnell.

It's really a bush league attempt at Monday Night Football. I did like the game however, even with its low score. That Jacksonville team is just mean (and very tall).

I can't decide if I hate Theissman or Kornheiser more. I'm leaning towards Theissman because I've hated his Sunday night schtick for a lot longer than I've hated Kornheiser.

I agree Rasix, the 2nd ESPN crew was much better.

Add me to the list of fans of the 'backup' crew. Jaworski might get a bit too worked up about QB stuff, but he definitely knows his shit. Kornheiser is blah at best, and Theismann is a raging douchebag. Tirico is just vanilla as hell.

MNF is horrible. They had that screwup and the other one mentioned (the "Here are three lines of bio text to include...") as well as:

"Aeriel coverage provided by..."

Kornheiser is really annoying, he doesn't know anything about footaball, all he does is repeat stupid stats that come over his earpiece. You can tell Theisman hates him, he always directs his comments to Tourico. Theisman and Kornheiser also snipe at each other a lot in really bitchy, passive-aggressive manner. I don't tune it to listen to two guys fight for 3 hours.

Jaws is awesome. He actually knows about football. I love his segments on the NFL shows where he shows a play and dissects it because I actually learn something.

Quote from: Rasix on September 20, 2006, 01:28:18 PM

I agree completely. Kornheiser is just a twat, and I've never liked him, especially on PTI. I still can't figure out how or why he got stuck in the booth. What was wrong with Maguire? He wasn't great, and he and Theismann were always sniping at each other, but shit, he was better than this guy. Dennis Miller was better than this guy. I still can't understand the Dennis Miller strategy of "put a regular guy loudmouth type in the booth." If you're going to do that, just put Mike Greenberg in there, at least he's smart and funny.

And put me in the Jaws over Theismann camp too. Jaws is enthusiastic and fun, Theismann just rubs me the wrong way.

Every time I hear Theismann talk I get a visual of Lawrence Taylor running on camera from off stage and just destroying him. It keeps me going.

Jaws helps you learn about football (you seriously cannot watch this guy and not learn anything). Kind of like how Madden can occasionally when he's able to peel back the layers of senility for a brief moment.

Kornheiser just reminds me of the non-funny douchebag in your science class from high school. He's rattling off the smart alec responses from the back row but not saying anything funny, interesting, or even relevant. People want him to just go away, but he persists.

Kornheiser was decent on PTI because the whole point of the show was a scripted, planned-out snipe-fest at sports in general. He makes a good jackass. However, on MNF, he just sounds annoying AND people know more than he does.

Here's a NY Times Article:

Quote

David Carr
Pigskin to Thin Skin to Skin Alive

TONY KORNHEISER is living the dream of modern American journalism, having gone multiplatform long before being multiplatform was cool — or even a catchphrase. A newspaper and Internet sports columnist, radio host and sports television talker, Mr. Kornheiser is the embodiment of the new paradigm, a dream employee for every newspaper that is looking to make its journalism available across all platforms and its columnists into stars — which is to say, all newspapers.
And this season, he took on one of sports journalism’s most visible slots, becoming the color commentator on “Monday Night Football,” which has moved to ESPN. But there are indications that Mr. Kornheiser has risen to a status that may test his temperament and could create problems, along with a fair amount of buzz, for his employers.

Amid generally positive notices, a few tepid reviews of his first broadcast came in from The Washington Post and ESPN, two organizations Mr. Kornheiser draws a paycheck from, he threw the kind of hissy fit that added some dark shading to his jocular public persona.

Paul Farhi, his colleague at The Washington Post, found something wanting in the opening show, writing that “Kornheiser mostly spluttered, typically emphasizing the obvious.” Mr. Kornheiser responded with unseemly keening.

“I apparently got ripped in my own newspaper, The Washington Post. You know, by a two-bit weasel slug named Paul Farhi, who I would gladly run over with a Mack truck given the opportunity,” he told Dan Patrick of ESPN Radio. (Once he had time to calm down and write a column about his performance and subsequent critiques, he said he was glad he did not vomit on air, but if he had, he would have aimed at Mr. Farhi.)

Mr. Kornheiser hit for the cycle in his response: petulance, cluelessness, churlishness, all wrapped up with a comical threat of violence. Setting aside his clear implication that his own newspaper should be in the tank for him, the name-calling might be attributed to opening-game jitters. After all, how could he know that by joining one of sports’ most storied institutions, he would occasionally serve as a tackling dummy for sportswriters and critics, people a lot like himself?

John Skipper, executive vice president for content at ESPN, said he was both happy with Mr. Kornheiser’s performance and comfortable with his efforts to defend himself.

“He makes his living casting a critical eye on the performance of others, so when we discussed it, he knew he was going to take some shots,” said Mr. Skipper. “And he is going to respond because of who he is.”

Mr. Skipper clearly was enjoying the fuss. “I didn’t see any reviews of ‘Sunday Night Football,’ ” he said, referring to the competition at NBC. “Other people will have opinions and he will have opinions. He is a person of wit and irony and people shouldn’t take it too literally.”

Like no one else, Mr. Kornheiser has leveraged a radio face and a newspaper voice into multiplatform stardom, but his history demonstrates that when it comes to dishing it out without the ability to take same, he also has few rivals. It is not that he has thin skin; he has no skin.

When Mike Golic, the host of a morning sports show on ESPN, suggested that Mr. Kornheiser’s performance was merely “fine,” Mr. Kornheiser was moved to say, “I just want to ring Golic’s neck and hang him up over the back of a shower rod like a duck.”

Last year, the ESPN columnist Chuck Klosterman took a measured swipe at Mr. Kornheiser, who then ranted on his radio show for days, demanding that Mr. Klosterman come to the phone and defend himself.

Sometimes when Mr. Kornheiser is feeling wounded, he does more than wave his arms around. When Stephen Rodrick, writing in Slate, pointed out that Mr. Kornheiser, who is the busy co-host of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” had not quoted an actual person in months in his columns, Mr. Kornheiser, according to Washingtonian magazine, suggested that Slate, now owned by The Washington Post Company, should cut ties with Mr. Rodrick.

When I was the editor of Washington City Paper, the weekly alternative paper had — and still has — a sports column by Dave McKenna, who also had a $75-a-week gig covering horse racing for The Washington Post. In 1998, he made a glancing reference to Mr. Kornheiser in his City Paper column. Mr. McKenna subsequently encountered Mr. Kornheiser at the holiday party for the Post’s sports department.

“He jumped up from his table, and said, ‘We got to talk,’ ” Mr. McKenna recounted. “I thought he was joking because I had always thought he was this funny guy on the radio. But he took me in the hallway and said, ‘You will never work for a real newspaper’ and then he opens his jacket and pulls out a copy of the column that had all this magic marker on it and writing in the margins.”

“My jaw just dropped,” Mr. McKenna continued. “His face turned orange while he was yelling at me and I thought, ‘Wait till my friends hear about this.’ This really famous funny guy seemed like he was going crazy.”

But Mr. Kornheiser was serious. The next time Mr. McKenna wrote about Mr. Kornheiser was in 2000, upon the retirement of local sports talker Ken Beatrice, an event that was covered with a great deal of hagiography in The Washington Post. But Mr. McKenna noted that back in 1981, Mr. Kornheiser, then a reporter, had written a savage takedown of Mr. Beatrice, causing him a considerable amount of personal pain.

Mr. McKenna was summoned to the office of George Solomon, then the assistant managing editor for sports, and told he was through working for The Post. “He was very nice about it, but said he had a department to run,” Mr. McKenna said.

Mr. Kornheiser was traveling to his next game in Shreveport, La., via bus and did not return messages left with ESPN or on his voice mail at The Washington Post.

Mr. Farhi said there are no hard feelings. “I’ve been amused by it,” he said. But Mr. Kornheiser’s decision to indict The Washington Post — “I thought my own newspaper would be kinder and I wouldn’t be backstabbed by this guy” — caught Mr. Farhi up short.

“Taking on the paper seems loony. My ears perked up at that,” he said. “To suggest that the paper should just lay down for him questions the integrity of what we do.”

The expanding portfolio of some star journalists makes good business sense for newspapers, including this one, but it clearly creates some peril as well. In the same week that two departments at The Washington Post were involved in a public battle, the executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., publicly rebuked Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the paper and author of “Fiasco,” a sharp critique of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War.

According to The New York Sun, Mr. Downie, responding to criticism from former New York Mayor Ed Koch, said that Mr. Ricks should not have said that Israel made a decision to leave some rockets intact in Lebanon to serve as a pretext for further forays. To compound the complexity, Mr. Ricks made those remarks on “Reliable Sources,” a CNN show whose host is Howard Kurtz, another Washington Post reporter.

None of this is to suggest that this is a problem particular to The Washington Post (it isn’t) or that newspaper journalists should retreat to their ink-stained sackcloth. But it serves as a reminder that when reporters become stars, they sometimes become the story as well.

Hey, they spent a lot of money to get MNF. You don't think that left them a lot to hire competent, literate people, do you?

I have to disagree with the popular opinion on Kornheiser and the enjoyment level of the game on Monday. I like Kornheiser (more on PTI then MNF) and the game was great. It was 6-0 till really late in the game. And it was a low scoring game because of 2 good defences not incompetence.

Fans that can't enjoy a good defensive struggle suck.

But Theismann sucks more...

It surprises me how hard it is to find good annoucers for football. I know its not easy but only handful in all of America? Maybe they should just get a voice actor and feed him info through a teleprompter.

I'm of the mind that Kornheiser is being held back by the presence of Theisman.

Kornheiser was at his wonderful on ESPN radio, but I do think there's a limit. Tony was at his best being a vindictive spiteful bastard with a dash of whiny bitch.

I don't think his schtick translates to monday night, but he's definitely not being help by the blowhard with the bum leg.

"Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but mockery is sincerest form of mockery." - Tony Kornheiser

Jaws is awesome. Its amazing how much strategy and depth there is in football and how little it gets mentioned. In baseball moves are analyzed and analyzed. Even simple stuff like guard the line or hold the runner on.

In football most guys never say anything about what is happening, what the defense is doing, comment on the playcalling other than in a generic way like "gutsy call!" etc etc.

I love it when Jaws walks through a play and says "they've run to the right behind the fullback each of the last 3 runs. This time they line up in a right-side power-run formation. The defense swarms to the left while the guard pulls to the left and the back runs a counter trap blah blah blah..."

I feel like I only get about 5% of what football playcalling is actually about, whereas in other sports I get about 95% of it.

Quote

Mr. Skipper clearly was enjoying the fuss. “I didn’t see any reviews of ‘Sunday Night Football,’ ” he said, referring to the competition at NBC. “Other people will have opinions and he will have opinions. He is a person of wit and irony and people shouldn’t take it too literally.”

You didn't see any reviews because there's nothing new there. The Sunday Night cast is essentially last season's Monday Night Football team, and it delivered exactly what MNF did last year. You could review last year's performance and you'd get the same review. The new MNF crew is pretty awful, but again, I've never really liked ESPN's Sunday Night crew. Kornass is just the latest twist on a formula that hasn't been good for a while.

But at least the NFL seems to have unfucked the scheduling issues with the prime time games they've had the last few years. It doesn't look like there will be too many bad prime time games, whereas the last few years, there were about 2 good games out of the whole lot.