As soon as the DirecTV guide said that the Dallas Cowboys would be playing the Washington Redskins on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, I knew Bob Costas would deliver one of his patented Mini-Olbermann monomaniacal monologues on the eeeeeeeevils of the Redskins’ name, despite the fact, as Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom mentioned on Twitter last night, Costas has been a sportscaster covering the NFL for over 30 years now.
I have no idea what Jerry Jones’ politics are (I’ve heard conflicting reports), but if I were Jones, I’d call up NBC before the next time the Cowboys are on Sunday Night Football, and insist that Costas not use the game as a platform for one of his political rants. Otherwise, in November, when the Cowboys plays the Saints on Sunday night, we’re sure some variation from Costas on one of his previous diatribes:
● Costas’ surreal 2007 monologue on the joys of turning out your lights at home — but apparently not your TV, not the lighted sign of your show’s sponsor (Toyota), and not the seventeen million watts of kleig lights at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field, when the Cowboys played the Eagles that Sunday night.
● Costas’ anti-Second Amendment monologue last year, during another Cowboys-Eagles Sunday night game, when the big story in the news that weekend involved Jovan Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs. Belcher killed his girlfriend and then himself, leaving behind a parent-less three month old daughter. (Curiously, while Costas blamed “the gun culture” for Belcher’s actions, he didn’t blame, at that time at least, the American Indian-inspired name of the team he played for driving him to madness, or its excessive electricity use.)
“I don’t blame Bob Costas. I blame the microphone,” Rush Limbaugh quipped afterwards. “If that microphone hadn’t been on, nobody would know what Costas said. If you stop and think about it, it’s the microphone’s fault.”
And now yesterday’s Grand Political Statement, when Costas’ microphone went off yet again.
Back in the 1970s, when I first began to follow the NFL, football was an escape from the day-to-day realities of Jimmy Carter, stagflation, rampant unemployment, and all of the other horrors of the era.
Today, the NFL, as America’s most popular professional sport, is a platform for every leftwing grievance group to blast out their cause-du-jour, whether it’s radical environmentalism, anti-Constitutionalism, or American Indian victimhood.
Between its thugish players and their day-to-day appearances on the police blotter (or worse, in the case of Jovan Belcher), and the thugish journalists who cover the game while wanting to play wannabe political pundit, the modern-day NFL inverts the hoary old motto of the rap and hip-hop crowd.
I don’t hate the game, but increasingly, I’m hating the players, both on the field and in the booth. And I doubt I’m alone.
Perhaps, given NBC’s pitiful ratings, the brass orders Costas to deliver up his political monologues, when they know that somebody is watching the network for a change. But keep it up NBC, and you’ll kill off this franchise as well, and move Sunday Night Football back to cable, where it originated.
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Update: Tim Graham of Newsbusters has video of Costas yesterday, and describes his monologue as “classic, patronizing NBC, and even more classic Comcast-owned NBC — the same sensitive folks who give Al Sharpton a nightly forum. The majority is wrong. Leftist ‘diversity’ cops are kings. Bob Costas thinks he is the wisest, most sensitive man in all of sports.”
Yes, in precisely the same way that Al Sharpton is “smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.”
More: “Defensive Costas tries to explain his ‘Redskins’ slam,” the Daily Caller reports.
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