Idiots Write About Sports

While we’re throwing out questions directly to our Southern California-based audience — remember: bookcases available! No reasonable offers refused! — I have an inquiry for any L.A. residents out there who happen to watch NFL telecasts on our local Fox affiliate: do the games look as bad on your television set as they do on mine?

I mean, the picture of any football game on KTTV is just awful — it’s washed out and muddy and very difficult on the eyes. KTTV seems to have a particularly difficult time with the color white — a bit of a problem since that’s the color worn by at least 50 percent of the participants in any pro football game. White jerseys are a blur on KTTV. And whenever someone wearing white moves very, very quickly — which happens a lot in football, unless you’re watching a Dolphins game — a white blur appears behind the player as he trots from one end of my TV screen to the other. It’s as if KTTV is intentionally making its football broadcasts look like a real live video game — a terrible-looking video game, but a video game nonetheless.

I don’t have this problem on other channels. The CBS broadcasts come in fine. ESPN’s picture looks superb. I don’t even notice this with the highlights from Fox-broadcast games that appear on ESPN. So I have to wonder if this is something KTTV is doing, or some horrible conspiracy on the part of Rupert Murdoch and Paul Taglibue to sell more high-definition TVs so that I don’t have to watch LaDainian Tomlinson and his ghostly double break off open-field runs whenever the Chargers show up on Fox.

Anyone else notice this problem? Or should I stop drinking cough syrup?

(While we’re on the subject of Fox, we had a Great Moment in Unintentionally Hilarious Pauses during Fox’s bonus coverage of the 49er-Cardinal overtime finish, courtesy of the broadcast team of Dan Miller and Dave Wanstedt.

Sidenote to this sidenote: when Dan Miller and Dave Wanstedt are showing up to cover your game, you have all the evidence you need that you are not among the NFL’s elite. That’s just a step above handing the assignment to the local weather guy and the intern from the nearest college radio station.

Anyhow, it’s late in the game, and Maurice Hicks has just ripped off a nice run to set up the game-winning field goal when Dan Miller offers us this insight:

There are about 30 or 40 people watching right now… [pause] at [Hicks’] uncle’s home in Gaston, South Carolina, and they’re hooting and hollering right now.

You know, Dan, I think you could have stopped right after “now” and still offered up a pretty accurate assessment.)

(Updated: Dan Miller wrote in to say that we were mistakenly calling him “Dan Martin,” and that his mom would be confused by this. So now she can be proud of her boy. Also, he asked us if he was the weather guy or the intern.)

I think it is a Fox thing, in general. I am from Minneapolis and Fox is awful. I went to school in Richmond for a year and Fox was awful. In Missouri, you guessed it - Fox is awful. I use the term awful in comparison to CBS, ESPN and ABC. They are all consistently much higher quality.

You're probably right on the Murdoch-angle.

The thing is, when I lived up in the Bay Area, I never noticed any problem with KTVU.

Then again, that station is not owned by Fox; the L.A. affiliate is. Maybe that's the part of the reason right there.

Well, the picture from the Fox-owned affiliate in Birmingham is fine. (Well, except for the hour the cable company lost the signal Friday night.) Maybe Fox is only bad in major cities. No, wait, it's bad in Richmond, too. Of course, in a lot of cities the Fox affiliate is on Channel 54, or some other ridiculous UHF station.

Fox is 47 in Madison and 6 in Milwaukee. Milwaukee's fine, Madison blows.

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