USC 17, Virginia 14, final. This is NOT a good SC team. Will be lucky to match last year’s 9-4 mark. Can’t tackle; penalties galore. #PANIC
USC 17, Virginia 14, final. This is NOT a good SC team. Will be lucky to match last year’s 9-4 mark. Can’t tackle; penalties galore. #PANIC
1) Chilly night at the Coliseum.
2) The crowd was surprisingly loud and enthusiastic.
3) The crowd was definitely hostile to the refs….hope they had an escort in the parking lot.
4) USC definitely has the best band in football.
5) Man I love being at a college football game.
Not sure which was worse, the two teams’ pathetic performances or the ineptitude of the television broadcast. I thought I was watching a game from the 80s (or whenever it was that they first introduced those TV lines on the playing field so you could tell where the first down marker was). Half the time they put the current line marker a yard or more in the wrong direction. Once the line only went 3/4 of the way across the field ending in a faux yard marker. And constantly the line was showing up over the players not under them. And what about the 40 or 25 second clock….never shown the entire game. (I’m not even going to talk about the several times the picture gapped as if you were watching a replay of the game instead of a live broadcast….I’ll blame that one on Time Warner…but probably not.)
Kenneth, your eyes doth not deceive you. FSN (or Comcast here on the East Coast) is awful. Aside from last night’s glitches, which included not showing the play clock and the various picture gaps you mentioned, the HD feed from certain camera angles went out for brief stretches. And Petros “The Mouth” Papadakis (captain of the worst USC football team in history) was his usual loud and annoying self.
Other signs of second-rate broadcasting that show up time and time again on these FSN / Comcast broadcasts: the failure to quickly review plays from different camera angles. ESPN replays almost every down from 2 or 3 different angles, especially when it’s a significant play or a penalty.
As an example, just in the last few minutes of the game, there was a personal foul on USC for a horse-collar tackle on the Virginia QB that reversed a third-down stop deep in UVA territory, and none of us got to see it because the original camera angle followed the ball as it was thrown, and they never showed a replay of the QB. Similarly, a USC player was ejected due to a flagrant personal foul on the onside kick recovery, but it was impossible to tell what happened, and the announcers / broadcasters never bothered to follow up and show us who got kicked out and what happened.
This type of weak follow-up happens so often throughout FSN / Comcast broadcasts, it makes me relieved when our games end up on Versus (!) instead.
In addition to the technical broadcast problems you’re mentioning, the announcers are consistently awful. Egregious examples in the game’s final minutes included stating that Virginia was “clearly in 4-down territory” when they were down 10 with 4 minutes left inside the red zone — self-evidently false; you obviously go for the FG in that situation, as UVa did (though they missed it) — stating that they’d used their “last timeout” with a minute or so left, when they still he one left (and never correcting this crucial error); and treating the entire final UVa drive, which cut the lead to 3, as some sort of effort to “make a statement” and “keep competing” (and conversely, asserting that Kiffin’s primary concern was that allowing a late TD would “leave a poor taste in the mouths” of the defense), and acting like the late timeouts were somehow surprising, when, in reality, UVa was still mathematically alive to win the game, and obviously both coaches were strategizing with that fact in mind, not engaging in some sort of amorphous moral-victory bad-taste-in-the-mouth keep-competing bullshit.
Unfortunately the announcers are consistently awful on ESPN as well (Bob Davie, Craig James, Mushroomburger, hello?). Herbstreit is the only one I like. Also, it pains me to say it, but I have to count Mike Mayock for Pat Haden as an upgrade. NBC hit that one out of the park.
ESPN has some bad announcers, granted, but those Fox Sports guys are a whole different level of terrible.
Well..they would have to be wouldn’t they…I mean..they work for Fox!!!
Let’s hope that the Pac10-11-12 new TV deal is with ESPN 4 (or whatever) rather than Fox.
You think Fox Sports is bad, we had a game last season that was done by the little known Fox College Sports. It was UW/UCLA if I recall and both commentators were UCLA alums who were the biggest homers I’d ever heard call a game. It was embarrassing both for that AND their lack of knowledge. One of them wasn’t even a former football player.
I think they should just call it the Pacific Conference from now on and drop the number completely.
David, we’re talking about the same channel / group of channels. FSN / FCS / Fox Sports are pretty much synonymous.
Yeah but the coverage teams for FCS are like the JV Fox Sports teams, if the “stars” are bad, imagine how terrilbe their backups are??
@gahrie
Actually they are moving away from the Pacific part of it and trying to rebrand as simply the Pac-10/12. I’d read in Bob Condotta’s Husky Blog or Jon Wilner’s blog for the bay area teams (can’t remember which) that when you call the office they great with you with Pac-10 now instead of Pacific-10 like they used to.