NFL

The Kornheiser Chronicles: Week 02

Posted Sep 19, 2006 12:35AM By mjd (RSS feed)

Filed Under: NFL Gossip

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Another game, and another unimpressive Monday night for Tony Kornheiser. Two weeks into the season is still way too soon to call this a failed experiment, but Kornheiser's more on the Darko Milicic career path than the Dwyane Wade career path. He's giving us nothing right now, but there's still hope that he'll be serviceable in the future.

He mirrored the game he was broadcasting. He was again tentative and conservative, thinking it better to just lay back and stick to the tried and true, as opposed to swinging for the fences every now and then. But I don't think ESPN hired him for the tried and true. They hired him to be something new and different, and thus far, he's been unwilling to do that.

• Kornheiser said of the Steelers/Jags game at one point, in a comment about the expectations for the game, "Nobody expected this to be a 35-0 blowout." I don't know why anyone would have expected that, or why it was noteworthy. It's like saying, "Nobody said that Joey Porter was going to read from The Iliad at halftime" to inspire his team.

• The celebrity in the booth this week was Miami Heat basketball star Dwyane Wade, a guy who's always been pretty conservative with the media. Kornheiser asked him if he'd guarantee a gold medal for the United States in the 2008 Olympics. Wade answered with a standard, "say the right thing" answer that I can't even remember. Tony then asks Wade what would happen if the NBA held the 2003 draft again, where would Wade be drafted. Wade's answer was again predictable and completely bland. An absolutely worthless segment, unless you really enjoy hearing Dwyane Wade's fake laugh.

• Kornheiser mentioned his fantasy team again. This time, it was at a critical point in the game, where the Jags were finally able to establish some offense with a couple of completions to Matt Jones. Kornheiser picked then to tell everyone how great the receptions were for his fantasy team. That's something I stopped doing after about the 2nd week of my fantasy football life.

Mainly, Kornheiser sticks to relating stories and quoting unusual statistics, things that anyone could do, which is a shame, because he's entertaining on PTI and on his radio show in a way that few other people can be.

He's got to stop approaching this like he's Trent Dilfer, and start going after it like Brett Favre. Yeah, he might have a few 5 interception games, but the games that people remember are the 300-yard, 4 touchdown games, and I think Kornheiser might have it in him to be that good. He seems unwilling to find out, though.

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