Lou Holtsth's Pregame Thspeechesth (and other comments on ESPN's college football studio crew)

One of the lamer aspects of ESPN's college football runup show College Football Live is Lou Holtz's pregame speeches. Each week Lisping Lou delivers an inspirational tome in the guise of a team's coach preparing the kids for a big game.

Unsurprisingly, the speeches are full of cliches and syrupy pep-talk material. Speaking as Lloyd Carr, Lou told the team to have eyes in the front of their heads so they could look forward, not backward. How thrilling.

Imitating Joe Paterno, he suggested Michigan was arrogant: "I bet they do the crossword puzzle in pen because they think they never make a mistake. They made a mistake when they scheduled Penn State."

OK...Penn State is in the Big Ten Conference. The conference office schedules the games, not Michigan. Maybe he's harkening back to his days at independent Notre Dame, when anyone who came into South Bend had elected to schedule the school.

I'm surprised he didn't use the pun Penn Statement.
Holtz's cheesy speeches are nice enough to listen to, but I'd never give one to my team. The feature is ok, but its fatal flaw is that the pre-game speeches are overwrought Hollywood plot devices more than genuine football pageantry.

In his retrospective video "The Schembechler Years," Michigan coach Bo Schembechler let the air out of the balloon, saying specifically that the idea of the fire-them-up halftime speech was "a misnomer" - partly because halftime is to make adjustments, and partly because the time to motivate with speeches is during the week, at whatever time the coach feels an extra touch is needed. Coaches will tell you that usually a high-energy speech right before the game is a mixed blessing, as the players might get too woudn up to execute, and then be unable to refocus if the game gets away from them.

I want to go on a little further about College Football Live, CF Scoreboard, and CF Final, all of which are variations on the same format with the same people, led by the looong stretchy accent of Rece Davis (if anyone knows where Davis' accent comes from, please enlighten me). The show used to be a hip and fun rundown of that week's college football action, mixing long-form highlights with short but sharp analysis. Things have gradually changed over the years, and not for the better.

Opinions on Mark May are well-documented in the blogosphere (here, for example, and here, which really comments on the whole bunch) and in accordance with blog policy I will not repeat them. I enjoy hearing his opinions, even if I don't agree, although his rep took a hit with me when he delivered a racist hysteria after Kentucky hired Rich Brooks instead of the clearly inferior candidate Doug Williams. (Brooks is white and Williams black, as is May.)

Guys with opinions are what make the show. My real problem is that they've gone from commentators to half-concealed cheerleaders, complete with shtick. Case in point: the chanting of "Sweed, Sweed, Sweed, Sweed!" when Texas receiver Limas Sweed comes up on highlights. It's almost like they're having too much fun in the studio to consider whether the people watching want to hear it.

Then there's the negatives. These guys get a kick out of mocking crappy college football programs, the sacrificial lambs that serve as fodder for the top teams ESPN likes to suck up to. Rece Davis thinks nothing of condescendingly saying "that's why you're Vanderbilt" when showing a Commodore miscue. His lame "fighting [coach names]" becomes belittling when he's talking about a bad team. Illinois (who still stinks despite Ron Zook's recruiting binge) is "the fighting Zookers." Stanford becomes the "non-fighting Walt Harrises."

It's like to make up for the suckup, they feel the need to rip someone else, as if taking down Duke football showed originality in journalism. Lou Holtz may be a big Notre Dame shill, but at least he's not part of cutting down 20-year olds on national television.

I think what's really going on is a sort of postadolescent jocksniffing. I don't know if Rece Davis played ball or not - for all I know, he was All-State - but he seems to have an infantile need to stick it to the weak sisters. Maybe it's sitting near May, winner of a national title and two Super Bowls, who himself appears stuck in some kind of football machismo. Only Holtz shows a consistent semblance of class, although he sometimes goes overboard - as he does with his reflexive references to teams as "the University of Florida" and "the University of Notre Dame" to name two examples. What does he think, these football programs are trying to be schools?