Football, Illustrated

ESPN elevated the conversation with its “Film Room” broadcast of the BCS National Championship Game.

There’s nothing subtle about football.

It’s a big, dumb, loud, obnoxious game and America loves it more than almost anything else. I love it more than almost anything else too but the game’s lack of nuance — at least in how its packaged, sold and broadcast on television—challenges that love.

When I was a kid addicted to following sports, I used to wonder what happened to adults. How did they lose touch with the games they loved? How did the boys who could rattle off the back of Mickey Mantle’s ’57 Topps card have little more than a vague idea of where the Yankees sat in the standings some August 30 years later?

I assumed this happened because adults became too busy to care that much. Now that I am an adult, however, I realize they just become smarter. The feel-good stories—the tear-jerkers, the heart-warmers, the easy way in, the reason a kid wants to remember everything about an athlete—lose their effectiveness when abused and man do they get abused in the era of 24-hour sports.

The two hours preceding ESPN’s telecast of the BCS National Championship Game was little more than these sorts of stories stacked up like vacation slides in a projector. Here’s the one about the humble beginnings of an offensive genius at an Arkansas high school. And here’s the one about the imminent and evident greatness of an 8-year-old quarterback in Alabama. Either of those make you feel something? No? Don’t worry because here’s one and here’s one and here’s one.

It’s not that these aren’t good stories. They occasionally are. It’s that the viewer is so clearly told how to feel about them from the first few swirling notes of strings music to the opening words of the overwritten and somber intro. Here’s is something that should move you they all announce and, after you’ve seen them for twenty-straight years, the intended result becomes more elusive.

And here’s the thing: This is the good part of sports television. The other part is the yelling, the constant framing of debate. These aren’t new criticisms of sports television, but it’s rare to see it all come together in one giant state of the union as it did for the biggest college football game of the 2013 season.

It’s even rarer to see the way we consume sports transcend that noise, but ESPN did that last night too.

For the title game between Florida State and Auburn, ESPN decided to experiment by expanding its offerings. This, with typical bombast, was called the “BCS Megacast” and it looked like this: The regular game broadcast was carried on the flagship station but viewers had many other options across the “family of networks.” One could watch the game without the play-by-play announcers and just enjoy the sounds of the stadium or watch it with hometown radio announcers piped in or watch it from the sci-fi camera dangling over the field or watch it with anchors making jokes and welcoming special guests and reading Tweets.

But the best way to watch it—the new and different way—was in the “Film Room” on ESPNews.

The premise was simple enough. Tom Luginbill, Chris Spielman and Matt Millen, three football lifers turned talking heads, sat in a room with three current college football coaches—Kevin Sumlin (Texas A&M), Paul Chryst (Pittsburgh) and Steve Addazio (Boston College)—and watched the game the way football lifers and coaches watch a game.

If television is often guilty of repackaging the same story, football coaches are even worse. They speak almost exclusively in cliches to avoid revealing anything of substance about their football teams. To do otherwise is near treason.

But the coaches didn’t have to talk about their teams on Monday night. They had to talk about Florida State and Auburn and this freed them up to be coaches, not personalities.

It made all the difference.

There were things to be learned here. All of the coaches pegged Florida State’s fake punt in the second quarter, the first of two pivotal special teams plays in the game. Sumlin noticed on the second—Levonte Whitfield’s electric 100-yard kickoff return to give the Seminoles a late lead—that one of the Auburn defenders pulled a hamstring on his way down the field. Whitfield ran through a hole right where that defender should’ve been, would’ve been if not for one of those strange breaks in the game.

That’s the sort of thing that often gets missed in a regular play-by-play setting, but the coaches caught it. The coaches saw everything. Missed assignments, extraordinary plays, great calls, bad calls. They talked about how they’d defend Florida State’s bunch formations and how Auburn was tipping off its designed quarterback runs. It was the game in a new light. It was football theory. It was value-added programming and that doesn’t happen very often in sports media.

And, yes, it required some basic level of interest in football on a brick-by-brick basis. It was coach-speak concentrate. It helped if you knew something about a Cover-2 shell or eye discipline on the zone read or run conflicts, but if you didn’t this broadcast could help you get there or at least potentially pique your interest, lead you to ask a little more of yourself and your programming.

The “Film Room” was an unqualified success in that regard.

Frequently, the only honest thing about sports anymore are the games themselves. They can be packaged and hyped and advertised against, but they can’t be altered. It’s a parasitic relationship most of the time but ESPN’s “Film Room” broadcast showed that it doesn’t have to be.

It will continue to be that way for the most part, however, because it’s what people watch. After the game broadcast was over, ESPNews rolled right into a rebroadcast of that afternoon’s episode of “Sports Nation,” the stylish and tech-y entry in the network’s infamous block of afternoon shouting.

One of the first questions hosts Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley debated was whether the San Francisco 49ers were the favorites to win the NFC. It’s a question that can’t be answered in any meaningful way, thus it’s perfect. The next question asked if Indianapolis Colts owner Ryan Grigson was “crazy” for comparing his very good quarterback, Andrew Luck, to Michael Jordan.

And just like that, minutes after one of the best title games of the BCS era and a potentially ground-breaking broadcast of that game, everything was back to normal.

The feeling and shouting commenced.