Mister Faded Glory | www.misterfadedglory.com

Each year our enthusiasm for the return of football season is tempered by reality once the games start. And we realize we didn’t miss NFL announcers, college announcers, nor few football announcers at all.

The games start, and our ears bleed. So before we descend into petty diatribes against forgettable football announcers – let’s take a quick moment to recognize two profound, perfect passages – penned by two blogger, no less. Passages so great, I wish I would have written them myself. So succinct, I know that I could absolutely not have written them myself.

First, Mike Tanier points out exactly why we have so many horrific announcers. In his Walkthrough, he describes the evolution of football fandom – but no corresponding evolution among football broadcasting.

You get the idea. You watch more football, read more about football, ingest more data and opinion about football than it was possible to absorb just 25 years ago. High level experts and analysts of that era could easily gain an edge over the common fan: they could get their hands on out-of-town papers or game tape, interview a player or telephone a colleague, go to the basement to search the stacks.

Those advantages barely exist anymore. You can watch a press conference or download the transcript. You can read the out-of-town blogs. The marginal knowledge that separates the extremely passionate fan — and that’s what you are if you are still reading at this point — from the professional football analyst has grown very small, and it’s shrinking constantly.

That’s why you find your local columnist frustrating, the television color commentator unlistenable: you know too much, and they probably haven’t changed with the times.

Amen, brother. We’ve all outgrown John Madden’s explanation of a forward pass, and Joe Theismann making up some leadership intangible just doesn’t cut it anymore. With football analysis, networks and writers need to focus on the high-road, the professional, the minute. We’ve said before, schedule upward, and the masses will follow. Will Cris Collinsworth and Jon Gruden let us down?

Today at Deadspin, culture editor Big Daddy Drew offered spot-on insight into national differences.S topping midway through his scathing Jamboroo, Drew encapsulates the difference between Midwesterners and the East Coast. The stereotypical East Coast anger really isn’t anger at all – but a manifested inferiority complex assumed by Midwesterners. He says Minnesota for example, but it could be Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and especially Nebraska. Those fuckers.

If you want more reasons why Minnesota sucks, take it from someone who lived there for seven years. Minnesotans are reputed to be the nicest people in America. They are not. They are only pretending to be nice. Underneath all those smiles and “you betchas” are the most passive aggressive race of people mankind has ever known. On the East Coast, people are far more upfront about their assholishness, which is far better. Minnesotans coat every gesture in a fake, cloying glaze of insincere pleasantness. You just want to shake the shit out of them and give it to you straight.

My Midwestern audience recoils in horror, and my East Coast transplants nod silently. So true. Now that’s a culture editor.

That’s it. Two shout-outs. Now, back to ESPN’s NFL Live, just in time to catch Mark Schlereth not abbreviating “NFL” for the seventy thousandth appearance in a row. JFC.