I wasn’t sure the Louisiana game (or Arizona game for that matter) could be approached but Justin Kutcher, Eric Crouch (!), and Darius Walked outdid themselves in the OSU-Iowa State affair.
All of these things actually happened…
Darius Walker kicked things off by calling OSU’s running back “Joseph Randolph” about 11 times in his pregame breakdown. Now I understand screwing up Lavocheya or even somebody more obscure like Blake Jackson (we’ll get to him) but Joe Randle is our premiere guy, he’s one of the only guys you know you’re going to be talking about!
Eric Crouch called the play where the QB and RB meet in the middle of the backfield the “read zone.”
FX showed a graphic of impact players for Iowa State while they were on offense and two of the three guys were linebackers.
Justin Kutcher said “good red zone numbers by OSU” as FX flashed an “OSU has allowed scores in 14 of 15 red zone trips this season” graphic.
Kutcher threw it back to Walker in the 2nd quarter and (clearly still reeling from his Randolph comment) he said about Walsh “he’s having a good game but it looks like it might be screwed a little bit because he has a little hitch in his giddy up1.”
One of the guys (it didn’t matter at this point) said OSU’s uniforms “might be an ode to Rickie Fowler.” Or…um…that’s our primary color.
Everyone who roots for Iowa State thinks the 6’5 black guy who runs down the middle of the field on almost every play is named “Blake Webb” because that’s all Kutcher called him.
“JB Walsh” was thrown out at least once as well.
Listen, I know it’s difficult to call a game, I’d be like Rainman in the booth if they ever put me up there. But come on, Joseph Randolph?!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this season though it’s that we like to roll on ESPN a lot but they actually do have guys that can call a sporting event.
We haven’t gotten to experience that this season since we’ve been on Pac-12-FX-FOX-Fox Sports-FX the last five games but hey, maybe next week.
- He was dead serious too, like he’d just unearthed this nugget of information nobody else in the world would ever discover ↩
Hah I heard the one about the uniforms being an ode to Rickie Fowler “cuz he wears orange a lot” and I was like uh….okay.
I thought that guy said “screwed”, but then i thought surely not!!
It’s actually not that difficult to announce a game if you forget about having “signature” statements and just tell the story. The part that is hard for so many is the preparation. I used to go crazy tracking down people who knew the correct pronunciation of the names and doing pregame analysis so I wouldn’t say something SO stupid that I would get retweeted a 1,000 times or quoted ad nauseam on blogs everywhere (wait, we didn’t have that in “those” days…thank heavens).
Loved doing it way back when, and I am never surprised at the stupidity in the booth these days. Part of the problem is that so many games are now televised that you gotta have somebody in the booth. Hard to find that many people who can just tell a story without worrying about ascending the ladder, or that take enough pride in their job that they are willing to do the prep for Savannah State vs Edward Waters.
Great points!
i guess Kutcher knew something about Walsh after all.