Surely, Booth Is Now the Place to Really Hit Paydirt

It is August in the NFL, time for the traditional barometer reading on the state of the national pastime, and what are America’s football fans talking about this year?

Oh, same things they always do.

The big transaction of the off-season.

Can you really believe ABC is sticking Dennis Miller in the Monday Night booth?

New quarterbacks replacing old quarterbacks.

Dan Fouts has to be an improvement over Boomer Esiason, don’t you think?

Youth movements around the league.

Did you see where Melissa Stark has 20 years on Lesley Visser?

Aging veterans trying to hang on for one more season.

Is this really it for Pat Summerall?

Suspect refereeing.

Matt Millen wasn’t any better than any of those full-time near-sighted whistle blowers.

Individuals pursuing longtime league records.

Now entering his 15th season with “NFL PrimeTime,” Chris Berman will tie Brent Musburger for most consecutive years as an NFL studio host.

Team chemistry.

So when Miller goes off on a rant, who’s in charge of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Fouts or Al Michaels?

Maybe it’s because escalating ticket prices are forcing more fans to consume their pro football on television. Maybe it’s because specialization and expansion and parity have made the product on the field less intriguing than the product in the booth. Maybe it’s because John Madden has never been charged with a felony. Maybe it’s because “Monday Night Football” made a more serious attempt this off-season to improve its team than the Chargers and the 49ers did.

Pick a reason, any reason, but if you’re listening closely enough, you’re hearing a different noise around the NFL this season.

In terms of popularity, influence and impact, the talent behind the mike is gaining on the talent beneath the shoulder pads.

Name another NFL-related off-season story that logged as much time on sports talk radio than ABC’s decision to blow out Esiason, the speculation/threat of Rush Limbaugh moving in alongside Michaels (“Are you ready for some bellicose prime-time right-wing sloganeering?!”) and the introduction of HBO guerrilla comic Miller and the Tigris and the Euphrates and the sword of Damocles to the Coors-swilling masses.

(Miller even wound up on the cover of Sports Illustrated, which is more than any Seattle Seahawk has done lately.)

Ask any casual fan why he or she tuned into last Sunday’s meaningless exhibition game in New England and they’ll tell you it was because Fox analyst Millen was pulling a George Plimpton--”Paper Zebra?”--and spending a few minutes as an NFL referee with a camera strapped to his head.

(It certainly wasn’t because of the Patriots.)

Booth versus field.

Studio versus huddle.

To put it another way: Which Pittsburgh Steeler combination strikes you as most interesting today--Terry Bradshaw-Lynn Swann . . . or Kordell Stewart-Troy Edwards?

Berman and Tom Jackson, ESPN’s NFL studio hosts, are better known around the league than any Cincinnati Bengal.

“I know that that [Sunday] morning show is on in almost every locker room in the NFL,” Jackson says. “We hear from coaches and players that they never miss that show. They’re either watching it when it’s on live or they’re watching the rerun of it--they’re not going to miss that show. . . . Guys in this league watch it to see what they can pick up [on the opposition].”

Berman says former Miami Dolphin coach Don Shula once told him that he used ESPN’s NFL highlights show “as a coaching tool. I said, ‘Get out of here.’ And he said, ‘No. When I play a team out of my conference, like the Giants or somebody that I haven’t played for three years, I start paying attention to those highlights about six weeks before we play them.’ ”

The cult of personality--or lack thereof--in the “Monday Night Football” booth last season was strong enough to lure onetime “MNF” executive producer Don Ohlmeyer out of retirement this year. Ohlmeyer said he wasn’t enjoying himself watching on Monday nights anymore. To him, the broadcasting team of Michaels and Esiason wasn’t having much fun, either. The games themselves were not enough, Ohlmeyer felt. As ratings slumped, the ghosts of Howard Cosell and Dandy Don Meredith hung over each telecast.

Where was the old spark, the old energy, the old unpredictability?

Finally, when ABC called and asked if he would come back and clean up Dodge, Ohlmeyer felt obligated to accept.

“Football is a game. It’s not played in St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” Ohlmeyer says. “When you’re sitting at home, whether you’re sitting by yourself or with a bunch of friends, you want to enjoy yourself. And what’s terrific is if you have the feeling about the people [calling] the game that, hey, these are a bunch of people I’d like to come over to my house, have a beer with me, watch the game and tell me what’s going on.

“To a degree, that’s what we’re trying to provide.”

That led to a Monday night booth cleaning. Esiason and veteran sideline reporter Visser were out. In came a comedian (Miller), a fresh young face on the sideline (Stark) and a pair of former all-pros, Fouts and second sideline reporter Eric Dickerson.

The not-so-subliminal message: If the passing and the tackling don’t grab you, maybe a comedy routine, dashed with the flash of a couple of diamond Hall of Fame rings, will.

Jackson believes Esiason was a victim of forces well beyond his control.

“I just thought the games last year were not very good games,” Jackson says. “Because the [telecast schedule] is planned so far ahead of time, no one could envision that you were going to have San Francisco and Atlanta in Week 9 both at 2-7. It’s unlikely you could in that Eastern time zone stay up and watch that.”

So if the coaches and the players aren’t holding up their ends of the entertainment package, it’s up to the announcers or it’s a channel-surf washout.

“At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for an exciting, closely contested game,” says former executive producer of NBC Sports Michael Weisman, now the head baseball producer at Fox. “Everybody looks good producing a 5-4 baseball game or a 37-34 football game. The expression is: You can shoot that game with a Kodak or a Polaroid and you’ll still have a well-received telecast.”

With the run-of-the-mill games, however, “it becomes incredibly important to make your broadcasters distinguishable from the others,” Weisman says, “and therefore hopefully enhance the product by making people watch a little longer because they like the broadcasters, or make it a little more memorable.

“And that’s really what you want to do with your announce team. You try to hold the audience. If a game isn’t close, you try to keep them from switching the set off or switching to another game.”

A game announcer capable of freezing remote-control trigger fingers for those few precious minutes is a rarer find than a franchise quarterback.

“In the previous millennium,” Ohlmeyer says, “there were only two people who had any impact on the ratings: Howard [Cosell] and John [Madden]. When John does a game--people are not tuning in just to hear John, they’re tuning in to see a game--but I think John is so entertaining that people have a tendency to stay tuned in longer, and that affects the ratings.”

Cosell, with assists from the singing ex-Cowboy Meredith and straight man Frank Gifford, had the same impact, to the everlasting detriment of every Monday night broadcast team that has followed.

“Back in the ‘70s, the great thing about what we had was that we had three totally different points of view,” Ohlmeyer says.

“With Frank, everything about the NFL was fantastic.

“With Howard, everything about the NFL [stunk].

“And with Don, if it was something the players did, it was terrific, and if the owners did it, it was stupid.

“You could throw any ball into the middle there and have a good time.”

Three decades later, ABC is still trying to figure out how to re-create that chemistry, with Miller, Michaels and Fouts the latest to do the dance on the petri dish.

Ohlmeyer says he is hopeful, but then, he has to be.

“What we have now are three different points of view,” he says. “You’ve got a Hall of Fame quarterback who played football all his life. You’ve got a guy who didn’t play the game but has covered it his full professional life. And you’ve got a fan who really respects the game and looks at life a little askew. You can throw any ball in the middle there and you’re going to have an interesting conversation.

“If you’re putting together a dinner party, you don’t want everybody who agrees. You don’t want everybody coming from the same life experience. Do that and it’ll get pretty dull after the shrimp cocktail.”

Especially when the main course, too often, is shanked field goals under glass and incompletions au rotten.