Do former NFL players make the best football commentators?

No

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by Jason Martin

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I would suggest that former NFL players do NOT make the best football commentators. There are many examples of why I choose to say this, my favorite being John Madden. While Mr. Madden has made a long and probably successful career as a commentator, he has yet to say anything original during a game. He does have the talent of filling volumes of dead air time with repetitious comments, many of which actually have something to do with the current or just completed play. His personal phobias are legend, but this digresses from the actual game commentary.

Former players, in general, have a rather limited vocabulary from years in the locker room and on the field. Making a colorful statement about a play takes a wide and colorful selection of words. The game is repetitious and limited in it's actions, so short of someone breaking a leg, it's going to take a colorful imagination to bring out any sense of originality in the commentary. The play book is only so long. Everything has been seen and said. Unless the game brings out some new rules or new dynamics, the commentary will have to concentrate on recoloring the same old cliches.

The top networks do not seem to have the normal rules of grammar for football commentary. It seems perfectly acceptable to repeat yourself several times over. Perhaps this is because the audience is not really expected to follow the commentary as a normal conversation. How else could Mr. Madden get away with the lack of concern for sentence structure or even accepted words? I have yet to check how this is translated to the latest version of the video game but I'm sure that they have included a good dose of the Madden homespun terminology.

The greatest reason not to use exclusively former NFL player as commentators is that they cannot seem to place the game or statistics into any sort of meaningful context. Football is a zero sum game; that is, there is a winner for every loser in every game. All the teams cannot win. This basic fact seems to be lost on former players, as well as current owners and coaches. The importance of a game to an individual team is simply lost in most of the commentary. It seems that former players cannot place a game into any context with the rest of the existing world around them. While focus may be an admirable ability for a player, one would think that some context with the rest of the world would also be a requirement.

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