We've come so far in the wrong direction

I grew up a sports fan.

What's more, I grew up a Pittsburgh sports fan. And scattered among the memories of some of my favorite athletes (Phil Borque, Bill Madlock, Sid Breem, Dwight Stone, Mike Tomczak, Troy Loney, Jimmy Paek and Tim Lester) are the chill-inducing calls of local announcers such as Myron Cope, Mike Lange, and Lanny Frattare.

Sadly, Cope is retired and Lange is no longer attached to television broadcasts. Even sadder, Frattare continues along his merry way (He's crap as a broadcaster, but he covers my baseball team. What's a boy to do?).

Local announcers know the team they broadcast with inside and out. They have well-established contacts within the team, or they played for the team. They don't know what they know because they sat down with the head coach for an hour three days before the game, which is the case with your typical National football announcers. Local guys know what's going on. They care about what's going on. And with the exception of Frattare, they actually pass that information along to the fans (All right. I'm being a little hard on Lanny, I know. It's just that when you're in a group with Lange and Cope, you can't help that what little criticism there is has to come your way).

By and large, the national media sucks out loud. And it's a sucking sound that rolls over our nation from sea to shining sea. Do I need to give you some names? Madden. Theisman. Collingsworth. Cross. Buck. What upsets me the most is the Steelers play only two nationally televised games at home. So I'll only get two chances to tell national broadcasters how much I hate them when I run into them at the buffet table (and by that I mean I'll smile and shake hands with them and say, "It's really nice to meet you." -- I will not, under any circumstances, tell them I admire them or compliment their work. Take that, Joe Theisman!).

So, when it comes to watching a broadcast at home, give me local radio announcers or give me nothing. Nothing? That's right. Nothing. There's no way we're ready for it, but I think our sports viewing experience would benefit from removing announcers altogether.

Let's be honest. Why are you watching the game at home? Because you're not there in person. So, in order to give people a sports-watching experience at home, we saddle them with windbags that they would never hear if they were at the stadium. And sadly, the trend has been to add announcers and (groan) sideline reporters. Thank you CBS for stopping that madness. Where there used to be a play-by-play announcer and a color man, now we have a third blithering idiot to add another voice that you really shouldn't be hearing in the first place (See: Dennis Miller, Paul MacGuire, Tony Kornheiser).

Speaking of Kornheiser -- whom I have a man-crush on thanks to his work with Michael Wilbon in Pardon the Interruption -- his addition to ESPN's Monday Night Football lineup was given such significance that his first Monday Night Football call of Oakland at Minnesota has drawn more examination and criticism than the actual play of the Raiders and Vikings. Kornheiser's Washington Post colleague, Paul Farhi, blasted him in their own paper (that's what Kornheiser get's for stealing Farhi's red Swingline Stapler).

Mark my words. If this trend continues, in five years, they'll add a fourth guy to the broadcast booth. So you'll have:

1. A play-by-play announcer (to tell you exactly what you're seeing with your own eyes).
2. A color man (to save your brain the trouble of processing what you've just seen with your own eyes along with telling the world what he would have done in that situation since, after all, he was a marginal player on a marginal team once upon a time).
3. A commedian / additional analyst (since watching a game of football is really, when you get down to it, an excercise in absurdity).
4. A man who speaks entirely in palindromes (this will further draw you out of the sporting experience by forcing you to analyze his speech to determine that yes, what he said was, in fact, a palindrome).

Here's a thought. Ban television announcers from the stadium. Take their salaries and use it on microphones for the crowd and for on the field, and for the actual stadium announcer (He's that guy who announces down and distance, who ran the ball, who made the tackle, and that there's a Honda Civic in lot 22A with its lights on). Let's see if we can't actually get a little closer to the actual experience of watching a live football game. Let's see what it's like watching a game without having someone tell you what you should think about said game.

It would be a fine thing. Trust me.