As Jason Witten would say, it appears ESPN's Monday Night Football crew has pulled a rabbit out of its head.
The rookie MNF announcing team -- Booger McFarland and inexperienced Witten on analysis, with Joe Tessitore doing play-by-play -- reportedly will be back for a second season next year despite the criticism they earned in their first.
"Like it or not NFL fans, you should expect to see and hear this trio next season," The Athletic's Lindsay Jones reported.
It's also anticipated that veteran sideline reporter Lisa Salters will return, but she has never been the problem here.
Salters has a traditional role and does it in traditional fashion. She's not part of ESPN's self-indulgent attempt to gussy up a 48-year-old American cultural institution.
ESPN is signaling that it's determined to continue its bid to reinvent the forward pass on MNF. It's doubling down on Witten and Tessitore in the booth, as well as McFarland, who's been bouncing up and down the sidelines on a jerry-rigged camera cart.
They aren't always sure who's supposed to say what when, and aren't always sure what to say when they do.
Do you tune in for these guys? Does anyone? Isn't the real attraction supposed to be the game?
Bells and whistles are fine, but not if they distract from or drown out everything else -- an immutable fact Monday Night Football has proven since Howard Cosell was unseated.
ESPN just breathed new life into its SportsCenter franchise with a back-to-basics approach.
"I think we miscalculated a little bit," ESPN's Norby Williamson told the Washington Post of why the flagship show has returned to its roots. "The perception became that you could just roll a talent out there and it doesn't matter what he or she is saying -- that the content didn't matter. I just never believed that."
Yet here we are with so much window-dressing on Monday Night Football it's hard to see through the window.
Tessitore excitedly hypes storylines in a bid to inject energy, rather than letting the game dictate its own story.
Witten's lack of TV announcing experience is painfully obvious, and it's a tad insulting ESPN thought viewers would embrace a trainee on what is supposed to be a prime-time NFL showcase. (Rare is the newbie with the poise and skill of Tony Romo.)
McFarland's gimmicky perch -- dubbed the Booger Mobile by some and a nuisance by ticket-holders whose view it has blocked -- has lent few obvious benefits to his analysis while making it harder for him to interact with the others.
There has been incremental improvement from the three to date, yet hardly enough to score this season a success with one regular-season telecast remaining, along with a wild-card playoff game and the Pro Bowl.
The only indisputable growth has been Tessitore's facial hair. Not sure a beard and mustache were necessary or add anything, but there's no question that at least they do what beards and mustaches usually do.
Witten, the former Cowboys tight end who retired to take the ESPN job, is still mangling verbiage and insights. Even when Witten seems to be making himself perfectly clear, he isn't.
Tessitore had just talked about the Saints' Mark Ingram serving a performance-enhancing drug suspension, when Witten spoke admiringly about Ingram's ability to improve with age.
Witten said it was a gaffe and that he didn't mean to insert politics into the game when he asserted that the NFL's new roughing-the-passer rules were "a little bit to the left wing."
People shot up and took notice when Witten said the 49ers were "kicking themselves in the foot."
It was impossible to ignore when Witten said something about how the Packers' Aaron Rodgers "pulls another rabbit out of his head" -- or called the quarterback "Sam" Rodgers, for that matter.
So long as Witten keeps offering insights such as this week's "One of the best things [the Panthers' Cam Newton] does is run after catch" -- when he presumably meant "run after contact" -- it's hard to forget his past miscues.
It's harder to forgive the people who put him in this position.
Sports on 12/19/2018