Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Whatever you think of their relative sex appeal, Michelle Tafoya replacing Lisa Guerrero on "Monday Night Football" is good news for sports fans. Plus: Shoo-in champs ain't what they used to be.
May 5, 2004 | I don't know how to say this without it sounding like I think Michelle Tafoya's ugly, but it's great news that she's replacing Lisa Guerrero as the "Monday Night Football" sideline reporter because it's a rare victory for solid sports reporting over eye candy.
Guerrero, a B-list actress, was comically inept in her one season on the sidelines after a few years as set dressing on various Fox Sports shows. Or at least she would have been comical if her performance hadn't been so sad and insulting to football fans.
The hiring of Tafoya is an unusual case of the sports TV industry catering to its best customers, actual sports fans. Again and again, those folks are taken for granted, assumed to be willing to put up with anything as long as they can see the game they want to watch. TV networks instead concentrate on increasing their ratings by drawing in non-fans with gimmicks like Rush Limbaugh, celebrity interviews during game action, silly cellphone poll questions and hot babes.
Maybe it worked for ABC last year. The ratings for "Monday Night Football" were up slightly. But the hiring of Guerrero to replace Melissa Stark, who left after three seasons to have a baby, was a timid compromise move.
The network wanted to hire a babe, but not just a babe, like Fox Sports news reader Lisa Dergan, whose main qualification as a sports reporter is that she might be the best golfer ever to have been a Playboy centerfold. So it went with Guerrero, who was never an Internet search champ but was certainly FHM covergirl material, and who'd logged some time doing fluff interviews and reading scripts, so she had some flimsy credibility.
"I'm a believer in her talent," said "Monday Night Football" producer Fred Gaudelli of Guerrero, "but I didn't think the role and her talent matched up."
If you say so.
I'm on record as believing that sideline reporters are pretty useless, adding nothing to the broadcast of a game. But if you're going to have one, at least have a real reporter, just in case there's a need, and to reward the people who have done good work, like Tafoya, who's reported and announced games for CBS and ESPN for a decade.
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