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Monday, October 30, 2000

No offense, Ian Eagle and Mark May. Honest. But after you guys already have worked half of the Steelers' eight games, somebody at CBS should make that your season's assignment, force you to cover this team regularly.

You know the Steelers.

You know the players, the coaches, the issues, the defensive dominance, the quarterback revolving door, the black and gold.

You know that Steelers viewers at home don't want to hear inanities about the population of China or Jerome Bettis "sticking it in there like a man" or facts getting mangled. These viewers require a broadcast that doesn't leave them groaning and griping. They desire a show that understandably walks the middle road, you reporting the Baltimore end of things yesterday such as the continued wretchedness of the Ravens' offense in the Dead Zone amid this 9-6 Steelers' triumph.

You appreciate this style of play and the new slogan for AFC Central football: We're relatively pointless.

"How much offense will we actually see?" Eagle wondered early in the broadcast.

It amounted to one touchdown and a telecast more expeditious than most baseball games: 2 hours, 49 minutes. Work fast, throw incompletions, run and defend to victory. Eagle and May can handle that.

Eagle and May have handled this stripe of football four of the past six weeks. Networks assign crews by an unspoken rank, and when the Steelers were 0-2 and heading toward 0-3 against Tennessee, CBS sent the so-called fourth team to Three Rivers Stadium. After that last-minutes loss, Eagle and May then watched the Steelers beat the undefeated New York Jets, shut out Cleveland last week and prolong the Ravens' offensive woes. (Will they score nevermore?)

Maybe networks should start assigning crews to the same divisions, the same teams, every week whenever possible. Because we at home can tell when the announcers intimately know their teams or merely regurgitate whatever they learned the day before in superficial sit downs. Guys like Eagle and May know the Steelers and the AFC Central now. They have acquired an expertise that would be a terrible thing to waste.

There were a couple of gaffes yesterday, granted. The play-by-play man announced that long snapper Mike Schneck was inactive, then he wasn't ... sounding as if he were given some bad information. The two announcers used the cliche "Red Zone" about 10 times (not including graphics) and Red Area once (Russia used to be one, right?). May's telestration still seems to resemble the artwork of Picasso's unsteady brother Irving. And, in a production-truck move, we failed to see that Hines Ward touchdown replayed, instead getting lots of reaction shots and the replay of Kris Brown's point-after miss.

Or, as Eagle so hiply phrased it: "Off the upright. Doink."

Eye-an and Mark, you guys get the Steelers. We at home deserve more announcers who do.

"We've done a bunch of Pittsburgh games this season," Eagle said at one point. This was about the time his color-commentator partner began discussing Dan Kreider's full-bore debut at fullback in place of the injured Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala -- to hear announcers easily pronounce that name is a treat in itself. This was a bit before the time May used a Virginia Tech-on-CBS promo to mention how well his alma mater Pitt played Saturday, and a bit after the time May repeated his criticism that the Steelers ought to throw higher and more often to Plaxico Burress.

They also have a woman director, Suzanne Smith, who spares us the gratuitous cheerleader camera shots. When we get such a view, like the one yesterday, it shows a cheerleader looking really stupid. Meooowwww. I love it.

They will be missed next week, when Gus Johnson and Brent Jones work the Tennessee game. They haven't seen the Steelers since Week 2. Then again, that was when Jones moaned about the local club failing to attempt a fade pass with Burress.

Just so long as CBS gives us booth consistency.

Program notes

The Oklahoma-Nebraska game wasn't mentioned in your local TV listings, so maybe you were among the lucky few who tuned into WTAE-TV Saturday expecting Rutgers-Boston College and got a sumptuous surprise. ESPN and ABC jockeyed throughout the week to enlarge the audience share for the previously scheduled regional broadcast, with it becoming a Nos. 1-2 struggle. Games were switched and TV schedules were changed, and a prospective audience of one-third swelled to 82 percent by Friday. College-football Pittsburgh luckily was among that.

Holy counter-programming: ABC, Fox (WPGH-TV playing a tape) and NBC all aired figure skating during the Steelers telecast. Only ABC's was a real competition.

This column has taken a jab or two at "The View," but Sally Jenkins put it best yesterday. Check out her perspective at www.washingtonpost.com. Jenkins was irked after the show's Meredith Vieira conducted World Series interviews that included asking the players questions about patting colleagues' posteriors and other such nonsense that destroys the credibility women sportscasters and sports writers worked a quarter-century to earn.