Correct. Jaws is under contract to ESPN. More generally I think he thinks he's got a better career as a talking head than a coach.
jaws and gruden clashed more than not. espn gave gruden the main stage all to himself to keep him happy and off the sidelines. espn 'promoted' jaws to a 'demotion'. how does that work??? anyway jaws would probably be the perfect guy to wring the most out of sanchez and the entire passing attack.
My god I hope you are way off base. The last thing the NFL needs is another celebrity clown desecrating the telecast. Dennis Miller doing MNF was probably the worst idea in NFL history. I wanted to shoot that asshole in the face.
If we're lucky it'll be a celebrity with a clue if it happens. The NFL is entertainment. It stands to reason that they'll do what they need to do to be more entertaining, especially to people who might not otherwise tune in to a game. The whole game is going to change over the next decade. The concussions almost guarantee that at this point. The NFL and the networks are going to do a lot of things we wouldn't have thought likely in response.
The one thing that I don't think has been mentioned here that i read was a factor in all this is that the new contract gives ESPN more time and opportunities to discuss the NFL in studio shows. I frankly was not previously aware there were limitations on that sort of thing. But if this is true, then ESPN intends to use Jaws more as an in studio analyst talking about ALL the teams in the league, rather than just the one team Gruden does not talk about on MNF. We'll know if that is true if we end up seeing Jaws alot more on their studio shows. Imo is very well suited to that kind of analyst role, while Gruden, imo also a very good analyst, seems better suited for the MNF job as long as he somwhat lessens calling half the players he talks about as being "great".
So what you are saying is that he is good? And to think he has been the starter for 3 years with limited time in college, I like the direction he is heading in. :wink:
I understand where you're coming from but I still have to doubt that they'll put another celebrity in the broadcast booth. Dennis Miller was an out and out disaster and even if they got someone who had some football knowledge I still think it would turn off more fans than it would pull in. How many people who normally would never turn on a game are going to tune in just because Will Smith is making a few comments on the game?
It's actually worse than that to tell you the truth. If they put somebody like Will Smith in the booth they'd be having him do some commentary on the football game but mostly they'd be having him do promos for the ABC shows that were hot or they were trying to make hot. The Dancing with the Stars type stuff. The idea would be to get more people watching MNF to justify the price tag on the package. You know what part of the game you can always get a woman to watch? When they sing the national anthem, especially if it's a recognizable name doing the singing. So now they have somebody sing at halftime also. Not the national anthem but something that gets the wife interested in sitting down to watch the TV for a bit. The thing to realize is that smashmouth football is history. The game we grew up watching and really like is melting away before our eyes and will be more like flag football in a decade or so. The concussions are THE big public health issue right now. Too many kids are playing the game and being influenced by what they see in the NFL games. The game is going to change to reflect that reality. And the entertainment value is going to have to change also or the networks are going to go broke off of the contracts they just signed.
Again, I don't disagree with your reasoning, I just think that if they go the cheesy ''entertainment'' route and take away too much of the game's original essence it's going to backfire on them and they'll lose a huge swath of the fanbase. Of course I could be totally wrong but we'll just have to wait and see how it plays out.
