FOX and CBS make NFL season finales this weekend

And believe me, thats a good thing. This year, the Super Bowl will covered by NBC for the first time in thirteen years when they covered Super Bowl XXX between the Steelers and Cowboys. Now, NBC has obvious flaws to it's NFL coverage,  mainly too many damn commentators on their Sunday wrap-up show, Football Night in America. But this could certainly be worse. They don't crowd their commentators in one little table like FOX and CBS does, so I guess they excel their too. 

NBC does feature Cris Collinsworth, which is a major plus. Collinsworth has this strange idea that football commentators are actually supposed to watch game tape and say things that many fans may not already know. Even for a former Receiver, Collinsworth actually tries to study line play, a concept fallen on deaf ears upon many an ex-quarterback commentator. (yes, I'm looking at you Troy) Collinsworth does much more work from the studio than he does from the booth and he still chooses to watch more game tape than most color commentators.

NBC also features the easily star-struck Peter King. As much as I give it to Peter King for giving obvious preferential treatment to superstars, (and by god he deserves it, Brett Favre confidant my ass) he usually does have something insightful to say and I'd be lying if I said I didn't look forward to his segments. ("Bob, I just got of the phone with Tony Dungy. He says they're going to look at the Bob Sanders MRI tomorrow and take it from there.")

So, NBC is far away and the best. I still think its a bit of a waste to feature three host types, and have two of them do highlights. Needless to say, I don't think it would have been much of a stretch for just one of them to do the highlights. But I'm nitpicking, especially when it comes to comparing NBC to the bozos at CBS and FOX. Both of them have been doing a glorified ESPN ripoff for the last four years. The NFL studio producers at both those networks feel like they have to appeal to the ultra-short attention spans of today's viewing audience, so they come up with segments with names like 'rapid fire' and 'true or false'. These games consist of the pregame show host shouting NFL-related questions that can be answered by the hosts in one word, or maybe even less. 

Let's come up with a new rule for sports studio shows. Lets put a moratorium on questions like 'Can the Eagles win in Dallas?' or 'How good are the Cardinal's?', because the answers given will offer about as much insight into the NFL as you'd expect to get from an Amish Farmer, meaning not much. And lets not forget the team segments, where they send one of their analysts to give softball questions to a team with rap music in the background playing the entire time. CBS and FOX are beyond insulting to my intelligence. 

I don't expect them to, but they should put an end to this dreck. Just because 'the four letters' started all this garbage, doesn't mean you should keep it up.