No shit skip, of course they shouldn’t turn the ball over, or get red cards, or what the fuck ever. Passing gas in the bathroom and think it’s perfume; literally shitty analysis I just heard on ESPN.
Why don’t sports commentators actually break down plays and strategy?
Only one I can think of is jomboy breaks down pitches sometimes. Showed that the pitcher was releasing at the top of the throw for like 4 pitches of sliders then released like 20 degrees sidearm with another slider but because it was released differently it caught the batter and struck them out. Beautiful breakdown and I appreciated the sport and gamesmanship even more.
I think what they’re saying is that there is a certain tolerance for silence from the Play-by-play and analyst in a football (soccer) broadcast in Europe. Part of it is style, but another part is simply the cadence of the game and the way crowd noise works. American fans tend not to (sonically speaking, and in aggregate) sort of hum and buzz in time with the tension of the play, and frankly most of our sports don’t have that same rhythm. Gridiron football and baseball in particular would be bad TV if they were announced the way soccer can be, doubly so with the weight of audience expectation. I do think an ice hockey broadcast can sort of sound like a soccer broadcast on meth, though, and thinking about the structure and cadence of play, that makes sense. In some sense, they’re the same sport with a different config file. :-)
Well frankly I don’t think the original point was super well made, since folks are talking about entirely different points now, but I’d agree with soccer, and tennis and golf in particular really being comfortable with far more silence in broadcasting - but that’s true on both sides of the pond. But the idea that surface level analysis is unique to American sports coverage is pretty false in my experience. Every sport I know a lot about seems covered at surface level - every sport I don’t know a ton about seems covered great. But I’ll say despite knowing a ton about amfootball the broadcasting is still pretty impressive. The soccer analysis I’ve seen is pretty good too but I’ll admit my depth of knowledge is much shallower. But there is definitely a size of audience and sportscaster population issue as well, because small sports I know a lot about have much worse coverage.