LISTEN, I know it’s among the most difficult assignments in live sports television. If, at day’s end, a sideline reporter hasn’t completely cashed the opportunity to make a fool of his or herself, he or she has done a pretty good job.
It’s not easy to ask a coach or player a poignant question in a non-confrontational yet direct fashion so that the response will leave us all a little wiser. And to ask it on the run, no less.
Even those questions that are designed to elicit an applicable reply – “Jones had three long runs off tackle in the first half; how will you address that in the second half?” – become stupid questions based on the answers – “We’re going to have to do a better job on that.”
“Thanks, coach. Back up to you guys.” Hmmm.
Given the task, those who could be good at sideline reporting are only slightly more likely to succeed than those without hope, throw-ins provided air and face-time for no other reason than that their network is allowed sideline reporters.
Then there’s the cut to the sideline reporter for the sake of cutting to the sideline reporter: “I’ve been told that the ambulance has taken Smith to the hospital.” Hmmm.
But every once in a while a sideline reporter will collide with the rarest of opportunities – a gold-dusted slam-dunk, a follow-up question so simple, so obvious and so needed that one will gladly abandon his or her next, predetermined question.
All one has to do is listen for such a moment; just listen to the answer of your last question.
Monday night, following the Jets-Raiders, ABC’s Melissa Stark apparently didn’t listen, thus she plowed through a stop sign so enormous that she may never again encounter one as large.
Stark interviewed Tim Brown, the superb Raider wide receiver who in that game had caught nine passes, including the 1,000th in his NFL career. She began by asking him how it felt.
“It was absolutely great,” he said. “I had no idea my mom and dad were here. You see, my mom has never been to a football game since I’ve been playing ball.”
Really? Wow! Brown is 36. With Notre Dame he won the Heisman in 1987. He has been playing organized football for at least 20 years. And for all the “Like, you know” responses that Stark has had to suffer, Tim Brown, volunteers the news that his mother, until this night, had never seen him play. Wow.
All that was left was the tap-in for eagle. Just ask why; why had his mother never before seen him play?
But Stark’s next question wasn’t, “Why?” It was “Where does this rank among all your individual accomplishments?”
Ugh. And that was the end of the mother-at-first-game story.
Brown’s mother had never seen her son play football because she’s an extremely religious woman, one who abhors any kind of violence, especially when perpetrated against her son. Oddly enough, Brown sustained the game’s most brutal hit, an open-field, full-bore, blind-side jolt while reaching for a pass.
That hit would’ve made for a good follow-up question following the follow-up question that Stark never asked.
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The only way to explain it is that it sounds good. Third-down conversion stats sound as if they should be advanced by TV networks as extremely important.
Sunday, the Seahawks were an impressive 8-for-15 on third down. They lost. The Falcons were a puny 3-for 10. They won.
Last season, the Bills won three games, lost 13. The Lions went 2-14. Yet, both had better third-down conversion percentages than the 13-3 Bears and 11-5 Eagles. Twelve teams with losing records had better third-down rates than the Eagles and Bears. Similar happens every year. You can look it up.
But it’s too late. The media have decreed that you, watching at home, embrace third-down stats as very important. But like most football stats, they only matter when they matter. Other than those times – like most of the time – they don’t matter.
