Mike Tirico, left, Ron Jaworski and Tony Kornheiser of Monday Night Football.

A cranky afterthought I tucked onto the end of yesterday's post, mentioned that we watched much of Monday Night Football with the sound off to shut off Tony Kornheiser's ongoing Brady-v.-Manning drivel, and called out Fox announcers for conversing through a Curt Schilling strikeout series. Liz Donovan, formerly of the Miami Herald, commented,

My Joe (from MA and NH so longtime Sox fan) has been shouting at the Fox guys during the MLB games: says they don't even understand the rules of baseball or the strategies involved. And don't get us started on some of the NBA commentators.......

Liz. we agree they're not thinking about what viewers want. How about we tell them?

Here's mine:

-- Informed play by play with relevant and interesting background on players and stats by people who love the game. Don't break out of that job description for anything less than breaking major news that people will care about. (cf. Howard Cosell when John Lennon died.

-- Video rather than chatter during breaks in the action: Replays, illustrations, well explained. Don't use canned videos. Keep us there, almost live or very recent.

-- Treat it like reality, where I often wish I could rewind and see the details one more time from different points of view.

-- Bonus points: A lot of people who aren't sports nuts tune in for the World Series and the amazing 2007 Patriots. Tell them what a knuckleball and a slider are, what a screen pass is, slip it in gracefully.*

Dr. Z -- Paul Zimmerman -- at Sports Illustrated is with us: What about the game? Major networks guilty of neglecting on-field action, on Oct. 19 -- before the games that drew my complaints:

So which network do I go after first, Fox or ESPN? Getting many letters urging me to go forward in my crusade against network idiocy, equally divided between antagonists of both super-powers. Think I'll do the ESPN thing first because the e-mailers in that camp are more passionate; the Foxies seem to be merely annoyed.

..."Shortest attention span by an announcing crew. In other words, quickest to lose interest in the game and go on to other topics,"

Exactly... they often seem bored by the game, treating it as a backdrop for their talk show. That last is from an email from Steve W. of Brisbane, Australia.

How would you change sports announcing? Click the Comments link to answer.

*Glossary
Screen pass: During a screen pass, many things are going on at the same time in order to fool the defense into thinking a long pass is being thrown, when in fact the pass is merely a short one, just beyond the defensive linemen. Screens are usually deployed against aggressive defenses that rush the passer. Because screens invite the defense to rush the quarterback, it leaves fewer defenders behind the rushers to stop the play.

Knuckleball: Unlike most pitches, the knuckleball is a pitch thrown to minimize the spin of the ball in flight. This lack of spin produces an erratic and unpredictable trajectory as the pitch travels from the pitcher’s hand to the plate. If it is thrown with great skill, the ball actually dips and dives, and sometimes “vibrates” from side-to-side. Tim Wakefield of the Sox, at right, is a knuckleballer -- check his fingers -- but he's out of the series with a bad shoulder.

Slider: The slider is a cross between the fastball and the curve and involves the best features of both. It is thrown with the speed and the pitching motion of the fastball, but, instead of the wide sweep of the conventional curve, it has a short and mostly lateral break; in effect, it slides away from the hitter.

Football positions, by describing what each player's role is when playing this position, may make clearer what players are trying to do when the ball is snapped, although this is pedantic enough to mention some obscure ones you may not see.