The Fuck Is Wrong With Announcers Who Won’t Call A Football A Ball?
Brent:
Why do NFL announcers use the word “football” so damn much in football games? Why can’t they just use “ball?” Last time I checked, we knew what sport we are watching. You don’t hear announcers talk about Justin Verlander pitching “the baseball.”
Well, they don’t want there to be any confusion on your part. What if you get disoriented and think they’re referring to all the OTHER balls on the field during a football game? What if they’re talking about the torpball, or the Quaffle? The NFL can get complicated like that.
In all seriousness, referring to the ball as “the football,” or by its full name of Foot Worthington Ball Mara IV, is just one of 800 highly familiar affects that NFL announcers put on to artificially boost the gravitas of the broadcast when it’s not required. “National Football League,” etc. I blame NFL Films for this. All of these dudes watch old team yearbooks narrated by John Facenda or Harry Kalas (“The 2007 Miami Dolphins: Caught On Cameron”), marvel at the cinematic narration of a cursory Week 12 victory, and feel compelled to ratchet up their own vocabulary for present occasions. The problem is that they lack anything resembling creativity, and so what you get is dudes saying THE FOOTBALL and THE RUNNING BACK POSITION. It’s always 20 words when two will do the job.
The kind of dorky overspeak is all over the sport. Coaches and front office goons use it all the time to help inflate the sanctity of the game. Players follow suit. The NFL has always taken itself far too seriously, and in fact the problem has gotten even worse now that people know the game really has proven fatal to its participants. That just gives Joe Tessitore tacit license to believe football is even closer to war than football people have always had you believe. Any excuse to make the affair more dramatic, he and others will latch onto it like a fucking lamprey eel.
I say this all the time, but I wish football wasn’t like this. You could solve a good number of the NFL’s problems if everyone involved didn’t act and speak like the sport is fucking holy writ. It’s an inherently dramatic game (unless, of course, Miami is playing). You can just let it be. Instead, we get an overlay of complete bullshit: self-serious men exhausting their limited mental dictionaries in between guffawing at Michael Strahan saying “butt” out loud on the set. I have no faith it’ll ever change. When Rob Riggle is the guy tasked with supplying mirth to these broadcasts, you know it’s a lost cause. Every play will be treated as its own Gettysburg. Every newly coined term will contain more word roots than your average paragraph written in German.
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