Notes, quotes, anecdotes and antidotes for a weekend morning:
Vastly underreported history was made on Dec. 29, when the Citrus Bowl between LSU and Purdue was suddenly placed in unprecedented financial confusion.
The issue: NFL and Purdue QB legend Drew Brees, who joined Purdue as an interim assistant coach for the bowl, has a significant investment and TV promotional presence in a sports gambling operation that shamelessly encourages young suckers to bet every game, all game.
Brees is spokesperson for and stakeholder in the sportsbook PointsBet. When he was named as an assistant coach for his alma mater, that previous relationship stood in violation of New Jersey state regulations.
So in N.J., betting on the Citrus Bowl was halted and previous wagers on the game were voided — protecting against any real or imagined insider trading.
You suppose that charming bit of history will be entered into Brees’ bio? Included on his Hall of Fame plaque?
And for those trying to score at home, there’s more to come. A lot uglier, too.
With so many sports betting operations to spread big money around here, there and offshore, it makes suspiciously significant action more difficult to detect and trace, and telltale betting line movements more unlikely to occur.
Professional tennis, as has several times been revealed, remains the easiest sport to fix, as it often takes only one player to take a dive — plus those to place the bets.
The lure to fix team games — college basketball for all its games and nightly action — grows as the real and perceived chance of being nailed diminishes.
Have there already been fixed games inspired by the flood of new, legalized, give-us-our-cut league- and team-certified wagering? You wouldn’t bet against it, would you?
Boom or bust: Esiason’s split personality on display again
Boom Esiason — “Weekday Boomer” — made news and noise last week during an interview with Boston’s WEEI. Of Patriots QB Mac Jones, Esiason said:
“Here’s the thing that I really dislike about Mac Jones, if you want to get to the root of it: His body language, his facial expressions, his gyrations on the field — piss me off. There’s a douchiness to them. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Here’s the thing I really dislike about Esiason. It’s his body language that comes from his mouth. There’s a phoniness to him. And that’s how I explain it.
As CBS’s “Weekend Boomer,” Esiason has a totally different vocabulary and view of NFL players. It’s clean, circumspect, cautious not to offend. WFAN’s “Weekday Boomer” is a coarse, gratuitous put-down artist and name-caller who covets an audience of socially desensitized young men.
And that’s why no matter how “douchey” Mac Jones may act, Esiason is a far bigger phony.
Is it too simplistic to suggest that Roger Goodell should have declared the Bill-Bengals game Monday a 0-0 final, refunds or credits extended to ticket-holders, then move on?
What we years ago would have fixed rather than suffer more ridicule, ESPN has only exacerbated, thus ESPN remains the home of comically stupid, self-exposing, hot-flash graphics, the kind that so often reveal the nation’s all-sports networks to not understand sports.
Wednesday, ESPN turned our attention to a graphic carrying the startling news that Georgia’s men’s basketball win over Auburn was “UGA’s 1st home win vs. a ranked opponent since 2021.”
To make the matter more ridiculous, Auburn was ranked 22nd, making the “breaking news” that much more insignificant.
How many red cards did Pelé receive in his career? None?
Well, there is an old, but unconfirmed report that Pelé was sent off in a game against Colombia for insulting the ref’s mother, followed by the ref’s self-removal for his own survival lest the crowd kill him. Apparently his mother went after him, too.
Who knows? Pelé began playing professionally in 1956 and the first time yellow and red cards were used was in the 1970 World Cup.
This season, again, Jets and Giants radio as an alternative to the unrestrained junk so often heard on TV became a dubious swap.
Jets radio voice Bob Wischusen, who plays it calmly and down the middle as an ESPN college football play-by-play man, continued to scream like an unhinged lunatic whenever a Jets’ accomplishment exceeded ordinary.
Why Wischusen still chooses to be heard by a New York audience as transparently forced, hysterical, insultingly childish and highly unprofessional is his business — and our burden.
As for Giants voice Bob Papa, he again chose to be heard as an indiscriminate stat-machine, giving the same emphasis — often immediately after plays — to the barely significant as to the totally insignificant.
Throughout the Colts-Giants game last Sunday, Papa couldn’t wait to share such info as Saquan Barkley’s 43 rushing yards against the Colts in 2018, how a pass to WR Parris Campbell was the 30th for 30-plus yards by the Colts this season and more irrelevant red-zone stats — offense and defense — than you could shake a pylon at.
Good play-by-play radio demands scene-setting, then description, not stats nor shrieking.
Cross eyes to watch FS1
The simplest lesson in TV — we can’t watch two things at once — remains unlearned.
The next time the geniuses at Fox Sports 1 get the idea to show a basketball game divided into three screens that include both coaches wearing microphones as it did with and to the Xavier-St. John’s game on Dec. 28, I hope Fox hires an outside consultant to remind the brain trust:
1. Viewers have, at most, just two eyes, through which they can see only one thing at the same time.
2. Viewers have, at most, just two ears, through which we can clearly hear just one person talking at a time … with the exception of my sister-in-law.
Reader Alan Hirschberg: “I watched as I would have, had I been in the arena — one eye on one coach, one eye on the other coach and one eye on the game.”
Sunday during Colts-Giants, in case viewers hadn’t noticed, Daniel Jones was throwing strikes.
So CBS shorted the scene to have us read all about it in one of its annually sustained long, vertical multi-colored graphics that track a QB’s previous 10 passes with checkmarks for completions and X-marks to indicate incompletions — plus yards-per-catch, TDs and interceptions — while allowing viewers a few seconds to read, remember and apply.
Or laugh at.
As a matter of applied common sense, we’d have dumped this worthless “additive” years ago, but CBS stays the course, as if the network’s top executives and shareholders demand to see how one of the QBs made out eight passes ago.
Why does stupid both persist and even grow? Because sports TV execs — those who should know best if not better — continue to add “stuff” just to add stuff.
Phil Simms once told me about attending a pregame production meeting at which the producer said he wanted to include as many graphics as possible. When Simms asked why, the producer was stuck for an answer — even a bad one.
Just as an annual, protect-yourself-at-all-times reminder: I am not on Twitter, nor have I ever been. The person using my name and claiming to have thousands of followers ain’t me, nor do I know who he or she is. I am not, nor have I ever held an account on any “social media” (nor been a member of the Communist Party).
Furthermore, I pay my taxes, don’t litter and haven’t committed a homicide in nearly a week.
