By Lewis Gould
If you are craving for more of Donovan McNabb’s whining, passive aggressive, victimization tour in which the former great Eagles QB identifies his career’s many slights, starting with being booed by Eagles fans at the 1999 draft, this is your lucky day!
Fox Sports announced yesterday that McNabb will call some games for Fox this fall.
Get your mute button ready.
It’s not that McNabb’s a bad talker, it’s that he’s proved incapable of speaking in television-appropriate soundbites during his brief time on TV and was never very good at explaining his play or knowing the rules during his career. Every sentence becomes a paragraph. Most of those paragraphs somehow reference his playing career. Many of those references involve a plea to “check the numbers.” It’s the sort of stuff that won’t play well in an NFL booth, where too many analysts rely on talking points rather than analyzing the game at hand. Call it Dan Dierdorf syndrome.
During a recent segment on Fox Sports 1, in 30 seconds he used platitudes and cliches, then quickly brought the discussion back to his favorite topic.
No one is John Madden out of the gate. Cris Collinsworth was too wordy and bland when he started in the Fox booth. Now he’s the best color commentator on television. Desmond Howard made fast improvements at College Gameday. It takes times for anyone to learn how to become a good analyst. McNabb might not get that time, however.
In an interesting twist, Fox announced that the spot next to Dick Stockton will rotate between McNabb, Brady Quinn and Kirk Morrison. It’s an idea that sounds compelling on the surface. Heck, it could be its own reality TV show. Instead of hoping one analyst becomes good, Fox throws three against the wall to see who sticks. But how are McNabb, Quinn or Morrison supposed to improve if they’re only doing one game every three weeks? Practice doesn’t make perfect in the broadcast booth. Only real game day experience does.
