CBS wasn't sharp in covering Super Bowl

  • Pin It

If you watch Phil Simms on Showtime's "Inside the NFL" you get an aggressive, get-after-it kind of guy who is not afraid to express opinions and challenge co-host Cris Collinsworth, among others.

Simms has been outspoken about the excessive celebrations in the NFL, announcers who talk too much, players who pop off on Twitter and a variety of other topics. Simms' grumpiness is a big part of the show as he presents the "old school" viewpoint on many things.

His "back in my day" routine even prompted "Inside the NFL" to give Simms his own "Sick and Tired" segment.

During the season, he caused a mini-storm in the New York media when he said he doesn't think Eli Manning is an elite quarterback.

View/Submit Comments for this story

But the aggressive, opinionated Simms was replaced by a much more tentative version during Sunday's CBS Super Bowl coverage.

Had he played quarterback like that for the Giants, he would have been sacked repeatedly and benched by new Hall of Fame selection Bill Parcells.

Simms was repeatedly noncommittal on things, and he can't use inexperience as an excuse — this was his seventh Super Bowl as an analyst.

It was fitting that he was in mid-sentence when the power outage happened early in the third quarter because he seemed to have trouble finishing his thoughts all day.

The biggest play of the game was the last offensive play by the 49ers, the incomplete pass on which Jim Harbaugh so desperately wanted defensive holding called.

This was the moment that an analyst has to step up and be definitive and the best Simms could offer was: "The more angles I see, the more confused I get."

CBS also wasn't exactly on top of the power-outage situation.

You can probably cut them some slack because this has never happened before at a Super Bowl and may never happen again.

But it seemed to take a long time for CBS to react and get someone on the air to tell viewers what had happened.

Sideline reporter Steve Tasker was the first person to tell viewers what was going on, but he had minimal information.

Same for the other sideline reporter, Solomon Wilcots.

Even when the pregame crew featuring James Brown, Dan Marino, Bill Cowher and Shannon Sharpe got back around the desk, there were few facts and mere speculation about the situation.

At the height of the delay Ravens coach John Harbaugh was visibly distraught and angry about something he was told.

Yet there was never any information given about what had Harbaugh so hot.

Maybe Harbaugh knew that the delay would change the game entirely.

In one regard, the electrical blackout showed that even in this high-tech age when anything is possible, we were reminded by how powerless we truly are when someone makes a mistake or some glitch occurs.

  • Pin It