Ask a 70’s TV Sports Anchor – Episode 1: The NFL Preview Edition
EDITOR’S NOTE: Boyd Bergquist was the sports director at KETS-TV in East Tree Stump, Nebraska for almost 40 years. Known across the Husker state as the voice of the Boy’s High School Basketball Tournament, Bergquist was a four-time winner of the Marv J. Butz “Golden Cob” Award For Excellence In Nebraska Broadcast Journalism. That background, along with his quick if not cliché-riddled wit and love of single-malt scotch makes Bergquist a perfect fit to be our “Question” guy.
Question #1)
Why didn’t the Philadelphia Eagles trade Nick Foles in the off-season?
~Frank Furter
Wow…Probably because they had no guarantees on whether or not Carson Wentz was going to be ready to go at the start of the season…which he isn’t. Now I know how Doug Pederson feels getting asked a pointless question.
I really hope the quality of questions gets better here. Whichever one of you interns picked this one…unless you want to be chasing my coffee and cheese Danish until you’re on Social Security, can we smarten up on the questions we pick?
Question #2)
Is it too early to call Jameis Winston a “bust?”
~ The Seminal Seminole
First of all, I don’t like the term “bust” when we are discussing guys who didn’t live up blame on the player for not living up to the expectations of some hack like Mel Kiper. In other words, it completely ignores the idea that half the time, Mel Kiper couldn’t find his butt if you put an airport beacon on it, let alone accurately break-down a draft pick.
Having said that, I can’t call Winston a “bust” because I never thought this kid was going to be a decent NFL quarterback in the first place. In my book, the completely modest amount of success he has had could be called “over-achieving.” Not only do I still think the guy is a low-wattage bulb, but after the whole “Eat the W” thing, he may very well be crazier than a out-house rat.
If you want to gamble the future of your franchise on this clown, be my guest.
Question #3)
Which NFL Team that made the play-offs last year will not get in this year?
~New York Dave
My best bet would be the Buffalo Bills, and there’s a simple reason why. They barely made it in 2017, and regardless of what they do this year, the Bills will have a new guy under center. Not only that, but it will be a guy named Nathan Peterman.
The “50/50” bet is the Vikings. Granted, their defense could be good enough to carry them to January on their own, but there’s two “turds in the pucnchbowl.” No matter how good the defense, at some point they’ve got to score. In other words, does Kirk Cousins live up to being an $80+ million quarterbaqck?
Also, just in terms of their division, everybody either got better, healthy, or both…even the sorry-ass Chicago Bears.
Question #4)
Are we ever going to have a resolution to this “Anthem Protest” stuff?
~The Unknown Blogger
To me, there’s two ways of looking at this. Before two days ago, the only people talking about this were a few media types who want to keep this thing going for whatever reason. This thing was dead before Nike announced it’s new ad campaign. I’ll come back to that in a bit.
I’m not really a “politics” kind of guy…I was just a simple farm kid from Nebraska. But one thing I’ve never been able to figure out is how did these protesting players think pissing people off was going to change anything? That’s all they accomplished, and that’s why it’s already been resolved. The players lost, and they lost badly, if for no other reason than they failed to win any converts to their point of view.
Everybody gets wrapped up in the idea that these protests during the National Anthem are responsible for the NFL declining television ratings. It could be possible, but it could be as equally possible true those two events have nothing to do with each other. Think of it this way. The protesting players didn’t help themselves by not being clear as to what this was all about, but you would have to be pretty damn dumb not to realize there are some serious social issues which need to be addressed in this country. The fact were even having this discussion says that.
If what I just said is true, then it means it wasn’t the message that was the problem…it was the approach. Getting people to understand your point of view means you need to do two things. First, you have to establish credibility so people respect your opinion. That’s become a lost art in this country, not just with kneeling football players. Now, the tactic has becomes “he who is the loudest or has the most visibility wins.” But that approach has the fatal flaw in that any message being broadcast can be turned off.
That brings us to the second problem. There’s too many people in this country more concerned with the message they are broadcasting rather than being aware of what is being received. This was the exact miscalculation of the protesting players. They picked the anthem as a time when they would have the most eyes on them.; never realizing that their timing might mean those eyes would look on them unfavorably and therefore killed any chance of getting their message across.
In other words, how could one not at least see the possibility that protesting during the National Anthem could be seen as anti-military or anti-American? Because they didn’t think this through, which is why they failed.
And after all of that, shows what a crap-pot the American media has become. I get that it’s a different world from when I was winning all those Marv Butz “Golden Cob” awards, but I watched a 2-minute piece on CBS News on this Nike ad campaign after it dropped, and it went out of it’s way to talk about what a positive business move this was. At no point did it mention that Nike lost somewhere between $3.5 and $5 billion in market cap from a stock within 24 hours of announcing this ad campaign. I’m no Wall Street guy, but even I know that a lot of money bleeding out of a company really quick.
That’s also why this isn’t about the anthem anymore. This might just be straight-up economic warfare.
In other words, who is really making the “sacrifice” here? What I want to know is why hasn’t anybody figured out this could be all about Nike screwing with the NFL for saying it would “punish” protesting players? By embracing Kaepernick, Nike just made their logo synonymous with whatever it is the players are protesting in the eyes of a huge portion of NFL fans who are already worn thin of this issue.
Say what you want, but the NFL has been trying to distance itself from that once they figured out this is bad for business. Now, it’s going to have that very same Nike “swoosh” logo on a large number of it’s uniforms. Throw in all the other gear, shoes, and what have you with the Nike logo on it across the NFL, and you can’t tell me the possibility doesn’t exist this isn’t a “shot across the bow” by Nike.
Boil it all down, and this isn’t about anthems, social injustice, or whatever other lofty load of crap you want to call this. This is about to be all about billionaires having a dick-measuring contest.
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We haven’t heard the end of the anthem stuff considering Nike’s new campaign is throwing it in our (and Trump’s) face again tonight for NFL kick-off.
Unfortunately, we in Tampa haven’t heard the end of the Jameis stuff either.
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Like Mr. Bergquist said, be it Trump, re guy who owns Nike, or the NFL owners, this is all now a dick-measuring contest amongst billionaires.
And I got an entire fall for “taking an Uber to Joe’s Crab Shack” jokes.
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After Tampa sucks this year, and Koetter is fired, I have a feeling that they will draft someone and trade Winston to NE to be Brady’s backup.
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After that comment, right now somewhere a Patriots fan is plotting to burn down your house.
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