On Saturday night, the Buccaneers will host the Chiefs for a preseason game. And the contest will be called, from the home team’s perspective, by Jon Gruden and Ronde Barber. Gruden will be handling the play-by-play duties, with Barber acting as the analyst.
But it sounds as if it will be far from a traditional broadcast. Via JoeBucsFan.com, Gruden recently addressed the plan for the effort in an appearance on The Ronde Barber Show.
“This might be a concept, you never know,” Gruden said. “This concept could be a game-changer in the broadcast booth. . . . I mean, there’s been a conventional way. I sat up there for nine years and did it. Mike Tirico, there was a cadence. ‘First-and-10, it’s da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da,’ and then you have to be timely in your responses and get out before the next play. But I think as long as we’re on the same page, we love Tampa Bay Buccaneers. We’re going to try to really educate the fans on some of the position battles, just the excitement of opening day in our stadium.”
It will be interesting to see how they handle the game. It was always difficult to envision Gruden sticking to the nuts and bolts of what’s happening during a play without blurting out “what the hell was that?” before laying out for Barber’s input.
And maybe it will be a game-changer. Maybe, in time, the current formula of non-athlete narrator of the action plus one or two former players or coaches will be replaced by two or three former players and coaches who supplement the visuals with the kind of commentary that will pivot from describing what we can all see to peeling back the curtain as to what’s really happening.
But here’s the key — it can’t be a bunch of jargon. It has to be communicated in a way that makes it seem simple and easy to understand by a casual fan.
However it goes, we’ve heard that Gruden and Barber have been putting in a lot of work to prepare for this. They have a strategy. We’ll find out on Saturday night how they execute it.
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