How is there so much controversy over the TV call of the Kentucky – Wisconsin game?
Apparently because, despite ample notice given that there would be three “game casts” — one for each team and one with un-biased announcers — a lot of idiots (Charles Barkley’s word) lit up Twitter complaining that Rex Chapman and crew were homer-ing it up for the kids from Texas wearing blue uniforms.
That’s right — uninformed sports fans, rather than taking the trouble to actually listen, or, even better, check the Internet to find out why King Rex was calling the game on TNT, simply started posting ignorant tweets (“This one announcer on TNT is so biased for Kentucky and it’s getting really annoying.“) The experiment, which will likely be considered a success by the suits who decide such things, gave fans the opportunity to hear the game called by announcers with an obvious bias — meaning that Chapman, along with Rob Bromley and Dave Baker, argued that every questionable call should have done UK’s way and got really excited when the ball bounced Blue.
Now, Chapman happens to be my favorite college basketball player of all time (he’s actually tied with Darrell Griffith, but I saw Rex’s two years at UK from press row at Rupp Arena), so I thought his cheerleading was kind of cool. No, I couldn’t stand to listen more than once. Nice experiment, and maybe we could find Rex some sort of job commenting with Kentucky Sports Radio, but only really big UK fans would want to listen to such one-sided game descriptions every game.
It was like hearing Bill O’Reilly analyze a Mitch McConnell speech.
Anyway, in the end, Kentucky won and is playing Monday in the title game. That’s good news for the Commonwealth, so cheer ’em on, even if you’re a Cardinal fan.
Monday night, we’ll be back to normal, with the 9 p.m. national championship tilt on CBS (which makes execs at WLKY-TV very happy) and no homer broadcasting, unless you choose to listen on radio.
