From the title of this post, you’re probably thinking it’s about Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers and the whole fiasco they are going through. Then you see this old, curmudgeonly white guy with a headset over here and wonder what he has to do with either. The answer is nothing. This post has nothing to do with Favre. In fact, the only reason I bring it up is to get that elusive google traffic of people searching for “Brett Favre”+Cheerios. In fact, I’m going to spell his name Farve to capitalize on all the typoists out there too. Now, on to business.
My favourite time of the sporting year that isn’t the Olympics comes in the middle of every March, when 32 college basketball games take place over a 48 hour period on a Thursday and Friday. Every year I take those two days off school for the first rounf of March Madness and sit around in my underwear in my basement cheering on teams like Holy Cross or Wichita State and spilling milk in my chest hair while eating Cheerios.
It’s a great way to spend a weekend, except, just when I’m about to go into a euphoric basketball coma, Billy Packer has to come along and snap me out of my vegetative state. With a voice like L Dopa, Packer is the eternal Robin Williams to my Robert De Niro, waking me from a blissfully ignorant daze. Of course, Robin Williams was a doctor (or at least, playing on on TV), while Packer is more of an aging mysoginistic bigot who has more shit coming out of his mouth than the two girls with the cup, but the effect is still the same. So thank God to CBS for finally realizing what the rest of the NCAA basketball-watching world did at least 2 years ago (though much, much longer for many of us) and giving Packer the boot in favour of Clark Kellogg.
My problem with Packer isn’t that he says things like “Since when do we let women control who gets into a men’s basketball game? Why don’t you go find a women’s game to let people into?” to college girls whose job it is to check media credentials. It isn’t that he’s one of the only people left in the world to use a phrase like “fag out”. It isn’t even that he called Allen Iverson a “tough little monkey.” It’s everything else that he does. Listening to his commentary makes it clear that Packer is an arrogant, set-in-his-ways, and possibly senile old man, so it should come as no surprise that he still uses words that make most of his audience uncomfortable, or that he still believes that women shouldn’t be given positions of authority, or even that he still thinks it’s okay to compare black people to animals. I’m not condoning it; I’m merely recognizing that he comes from the Don Imus school of broadcasting in a time when affluent white men could say whatever the fuck they wanted about homosexuals, minorities, and women without any reprocussions or feelings of guilt. Had he been fired over any one of those comments, it would have pleased me more than a weekend with the triple-breasted hooker from Total Recall, but more because I truly hate his announcing than because he’s a bigot and a prick.
And his announcing is truly where he falls flat. Billy Packer was the lead college basketball analyst on the biggest college basketball-broadcasting network, and everybody hated the man. He broadcasted the past 34 championship games, yet in Deadspin’s media approval ratings back in February, he got a 90.6 per cent disapproval rating out of 4500 and change votes. This was clearly a paradox, yet CBS kept renewing his damn contract year after year.
What should have made Packer a good commentator (and what probably kept him on the air for three decades) was that he was never afraid to state his opinion on what’s going on. Too many colour guys wait to be set up by the play-by-play man to give their pre-made canned answers to pre-made canned questions. Packer was legitimately different. He didn’t have an issue saying what he felt was going on. His analysis wasn’t always the greatest, but at least it was there.
However, Packer’s downfall can be directly attributed to the fact that a lot of his opinions-stated-as-fact were either clearly wrong, or assanine quotations designed to piss people off. His hate for the mid-major programs—the darlings of every Final Four tournament whose successes are what make the damn thing so much fun to watch in the first place—went against the cheering for the underdog mentality that the tournament relies on. Moreover, it was a case of blatant ignorance over the path college basketball has taken over the past decade. He said St. Joe’s didn’t deserve a number-one seed before the Hawks made a very strong run through the tournament, losing in the Elite 8 to Oklahoma State on a last-second three. He railed against the selection of four Missouri Valley teams in ‘06 before two of them made the Sweet 16 (another mid-major, George Mason, made the Final Four). Ever since Gonzaga made the mid-majors a Cinderella story in the mid-90s, the successful teams—the Bulldogs, Kent State, Southern Illinois, and many teams in the A-10 and the Mountain West, which have had the success to be included as major conferences—have become perennial powerhouses, expected to be in the tournament and capable of beating the best teams in the country. I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t want to see 26–6 South Alabama over another 18–12 team from one of the power conferences.
But it’s not just his inability to change with the landscape of NCAA basketball that has made Packer obsolete. The past couple season especially, his commentary has just gotten offensively bad. First off, there was his adamant defence of Duke’s Gerald Henderson after Henderson broke UNC star Tyler Hansbrough’s nose with a brutally flagrant foul in the dying moments of game UNC was winning by 12. I don’t really want to go too far into what Packer said, but watch this, watch the replays, see how blatant the attack was, listen to the bullshit Packer is spouting as though he were an ancient Babylonian fountain tied directly into the city’s sewer lines (best illustrated at the 1:50 mark I feel and then wonder at Packer’s audacity to suggest this was UNC’s fault for playing Hansbrough late in a game that was already out of hand.
Of course, this really only pissed off UNC fans, since in this world there are Tar Heels, Blue Devils, and normal, well-adjusted people who hate both and wish they would all die and stop taking up so much Saturday afternoon airtime when we want to see Chris Paul at Wake Forest. But Packer misstepped once again in this year’s Final Four matchup between UNC and Kansas when, after the Jayhawks’ Brandon Rush hit a three to give them a 38–12 lead 12:30 into the game, Packer called the game over. Maybe Billy, a Wake Forest grad, just hates the Tar Heels, who, probably out of spite, closed the gap to within four with 11 minutes to play before sputtering down the stretch and losing by 18.
So yeah, maybe there will be less self-righteous pandering at this year’s Final Four, but I’m not sure I like the call of bringing Clark Kellogg into the booth. Kellogg has never struck me as being particularly insightful either as a studio host for CBS, or in his columns for Yahoo. I’ve always preferred the other studio guy, Seth Davis. That said, I’m willing to give Kellogg the benefit of the doubt. All told, it’s a banner day for those of us who hate awful sports announcers. Now if only TSN would follow suit and pink-slip Pierre McGuire.
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July 14, 2008 at 6:06 pm
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July 14, 2008 at 6:28 pm
See? It fucking worked!