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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Ethan Frigon | The Beard Abides

Too fried from a week of midterms and papers to come up with a coherent column idea for this week, I've decided to use this space to rant about a couple of recent beefs I've had with sports broadcasting.
    One is the obnoxious tendency of football play-by-play and color guys to refer to quarterbacks, and only quarterbacks, solely by their first names. As far as I can remember, the trend started a few years ago with Ben Roethlisberger, probably because it was his rookie year, and some announcer was too lazy to learn how to pronounce his last name. Since then, the trend has spread to other quarterbacks, with announcers sounding particularly chummy when referring to not only Ben, but also Tom (Brady), Brett (Favre), Peyton and Eli (Manning), Carson (Palmer) and Drew (Brees).
    This trend has not, however, spread to other positions. I have yet to hear anyone refer to Adrian Peterson as just Adrian or Randy Moss as Randy. It may just be coincidence that it's quarterbacks who get the first name treatment; it could also be a matter of convenience, as I would guess announcers use the quarterback's name more throughout the course of a game than any other player's.
    But I'm going to choose a more sinister motivation: latent racism. Most football announcers are white, as are most NFL quarterbacks. The NFL at large, meanwhile, is over 70 percent black. I'm not accusing announcers of any active feelings of dislike for players of a different race, I just think it's a possibility that on some level, some announcers feel more comfortable with players of their own race and are more likely to show that affection by talking about them on a first-name basis. Whether or not this is the case, hearing a grown man in a football uniform referred to as "Ben" makes me want to punch Joe Buck in the face.
    The second trend, one that seems a lot more benign, is sports media's — and most especially SportsCenter's — habit of inundating the average sports fan with utterly useless statistics. For example, I learned on SportsCenter that Jimmy Rollins' game-winning double against the Dodgers on Monday night was the first walk-off extra base hit with a team one out away from losing since Kirk Gibson's 1988 World Series walk-off home run. I can speak from experience that pulling out a fact like that absolutely makes ladies melt. Every time.
    Later that night, I learned that the Chargers-Broncos game was the first in NFL history in which both teams returned a punt for a touchdown and one of the teams also had the same player who returned the punt for a touchdown return a kickoff for a touchdown. Now that's vital information for your everyday life.
    I blame two things for the increasing prevalence of ridiculous stats like these: fantasy sports and Wikipedia.com. Fantasy sports have made the average sports fan hyper-aware of statistical accomplishments, to the point where there's a decent subset of the population that actually cares about stats like these. And Wikipedia — because where else could information like that come from? I think I'll start throwing up random stats on Wikipedia, and I bet it'll take me less than a week to get one on SportsCenter.
    Aww, who am I kidding? I really love all the extra information. When SportsCenter told me that Eddie Royal was the 11th NFL player to return a kickoff and punt for touchdowns in the same game, my first thought was, "Come on, who were the first 10?"

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Ethan Frigon is a junior majoring in economics and International Relations. He can be reached at Ethan.Frigon@tufts.edu.