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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Huge ratings for announcerless Canadian football games carry a message for U.S. TV: Fans want to see the game, not your gimmicky broadcast of it. Plus: Angels, A's and Griffey elude the spotlight.
Aug 31, 2005 | Two weeks into the Canadian Football League no-announcer experiment, fans in the Great White North are voting with their remotes.
They're voting to watch. Announcerless games, which the public Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has been providing since it locked out 5,500 members of the Canadian Media Guild, are boffo.
The league doesn't like it, and everyone with a vested interest in having chatterers chatter during ballgames is coming up with perfectly plausible reasons why the games are getting skyrocketing ratings, but the fact remains that the CBC has removed one of the most visible, obsessed-over, seemingly vital elements from its broadcasts, and viewers are loving it.
I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this. I just wish it hadn't taken a nasty labor battle and a lockout to prove that people don't tune into games because of announcers, they tune into games to watch the games.
Now if the TV networks would only learn to show us the freaking games, to tone down the "interesting" camera angles and have the announcers and sideline reporters pipe down their incessant prattling once in a while, we'd really have something.
CFL telecasts average 408,000 viewers. The first no-announcers game, between the Toronto Argonauts and the Edmonton Eskimos on Aug. 20, drew 449,000. So, OK, novelty. People were curious.
This Saturday the B.C. Lions beat the Saskatchewan Roughriders. The audience: 580,000. That wasn't just the biggest audience of the season, it was the biggest by a ton. The most-watched game this year had been the season opener between the Lions and the Argos, with an audience of 492,000. The Lions-Roughriders game, sans commentary, beat it in the ratings by almost 18 percent.
And people didn't just tune in. They stayed tuned in. And more people joined them. By the fourth quarter of the Lions' 19-15 win Saturday, the audience had swelled to 746,000.
You don't watch a game for three hours because you're curious to hear what it sounds like. You watch because you're interested and involved in the game.
"People love the game," former CFL player and locked-out CBC color man Chris Walby told the Canadian Press. "The CFL is a great football game. The fact is the game is what draws the people."
Right. That's what I said. Except I think Walby was actually being defensive there, saying that people were tuning in not because there weren't announcers, but in spite of that fact. He might be right about that, but it isn't exactly a rousing justification for one's own existence.
