Rest In Peace, Gil Brandt

Happy Labor Day one and all.  Today is considered the end of “summer” here in the US notwithstanding the fact that the equinox is still a couple of weeks away.  Today’s barbecue is a bookend celebration along with the barbecue we all had on Memorial Day at the end of May.  Chow down …!

Gil Brandt died over the weekend at age 91.  He was a one-man band for the Dallas Cowboys in the 60s running their scouting department and their player personnel department – – entities that did not exist with every other NFL team.  He was fired in the purge that happened once Jerry Jones took over the Cowboys and named himself as GM.  In his post-Cowboy days, it turns out that he became a confidant of coaches behind the scenes – – Bill Belichick acknowledged that fact candidly.

Rest in peace, Gil Brandt.

In the world of sports on TV, Undisputed returned to the FS1 programming menu about a week ago with the moniker Undisputed Live as if there might have been some confusion regarding the previous incarnation of the show involving the participation of live humans as opposed to dead ones.  The first show back on the air featured the three “marquee partners” that Skip Bayless has enticed to join him on the program as “debate partners” – – Keyshaun Johnson, Michael Irvin and Richard Sherman.

Here is my first observation:

• If all three are on together and the subject is NFL football, the single best thing that Skip Bayless can do is to shut up.
• The single thing Skip Bayless is least likely to do is to shut up.
• They need to avoid having all three on simultaneously with Bayless in the future.

Aside from the obvious question in my mind about what the program will do after the Super Bowl is over and the sports focus will turn to March Madness, Spring Training and the NBA playoffs, does this mean Undisputed Live is going to focus on football only for the next 5 months?  This is certainly not “the panel” I would want to hear from when it is time to talk about the World Series…

I don’t want to be a wet blanket here, but all the hype about putting Undisputed on hiatus for more than a month along with rumors of who would and would not be considered as debating partners with Bayless followed by the fanfare surrounding the reintroduction, did not generate much of an audience.  For the unveiling of the new – and presumably improved – Undisputed Live, the audience was 131,000 fans.  That was Monday; by Wednesday, the audience shrank to 78,000.  Here is the comparison that is most ominous:

• Back in July when Bayless and Shannon Sharpe were in the end stages of a break-up, the audience for Undisputed was 154,000.
• The Wednesday audience for the new Undisputed Live was only half of what went off the air back in July.

Since then, the program announced that Rachel Nichols and Josina Anderson – – both ESPN alums – – will be joining the program down the line.  Both have been successful as studio hosts; it is unclear how or if they might perform in any sort of staged debate program format.  But at least, they are not former NFL players…

Meanwhile, over on ESPN where the direct competition for Undisputed Live is Stephen A. Smith’s program, First Take, there does not seem to be any reason for panic.  First Take averages an audience of about 450,000; that is about triple the biggest audience Undisputed drew back in July and that is a comfortable margin for those folks to sit on.

Finally, I’ll close with these words from Ambrose Bierce that have relevance today as well as when they were penned:

“Conservative n.:  A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wants to replace them with others.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………