So I take it NBC is trying to get me to not want to tune in for their pre and post-game shows anymore. As I mentioned a few weeks back in "Things I'm tired of seeing this NFL season," all NFL broadcasters and analysts are not created equal, and NBC has the worst. First, they're led by Chris Collinsworth, the arrogant smarmy bastard who pretends all his half-assed opinions are facts and doesn't know nearly as much as he thinks he does. Then you have the other three smarmy white guys who can be just as annoying. Finally there's Tiki Barber and Jerome Bettis who only have the job because they were good football players. But as we all know a good football player does not a good announcer make. Neither of them has anything insightful to say whatsoever unless the topic of conversation happens to be running backs or the teams they themselves played for. The other 90% of the show they just sit there looking stupid. NBC actually seemed to figure that out toward the end of the year when they actually took them out of the studio and sent them as correspondents to wherever the Giants and Steelers happened to be playing that week.
As if this wasn't bad enough, they've decided to take it one step further. Last Saturday in their wildcard playoff pre-game show, one of the smarmy white guys interviewed Matt Millen, best known as the GM who took a mediocre Detroit Lions team almost a decade ago and turned them into the worst franchise the game has ever seen, culminating with their perfectly imperfect 0-16 record this year. Everyone made jokes about it all year, but really, just how terrible does a team have to be to actually play the entire season without accidentally winning one? As recently as halfway through the season all the "experts" were predicting that no matter how bad a team may look, there will never be a team so bad that they actually go 0-16. Well, I guess the Lions saw that as a challenge, and thanks to Matt Millen, they had the talent to do the impossible.
At any rate, last Saturday I was looking forward to seeing the interview with Matt Millen as I expected it to pretty much lambaste him as the worst GM in the history of football, and it really was. He came out of the interview looking like a failure and a fool, and we Lions fans were happy.
Until the segment following the interview, in which Matt Millen had joined the studio team behind the bench and was providing analysis with the rest of the guys like everything was okay. He then stayed in the studio with Collinsworth and co. for the remainder of the day and none of them acted like anything than that Matt Millen was just another guy on the team.
I think I speak for all Detroit Lions fans everywhere when I say "Get Matt Millen the hell off my TV."
Matt Millen on the weekly pre-game show? Are you fucking kidding me? It's been hard enough to be a Lions fan ever since Barry Sanders retired, and now apparently every week I have to watch the man who is single-handedly responsible for the Lions being the worst franchise in NFL history provide "expert analysis" and just sit there and accept that? That would have been like Art Modell performing standup at the halftime show the year he moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore. Although speaking of Art Modell, as some of you doubtless heard he was actually nominated for one the Hall of Fame slots this year as a contributor. Even though he was eliminated during an early round of voting, I don't think Cleveland Browns fans are the only ones upset by this travesty. Relocationist owners have no place in the Hall of Fame. How a relocationist can even be considered as an induction as a contributor is beyond me as moving a team does more harm than good for the league and the game in general. But of course, this is written from a fan's perspective and what the hell do we know? All we do is buy the tickets, jerseys, jackets, and GameDay packages. Why should we let a little thing bother us like taking the person who ruined our team and shove them in our faces?