Last night I tuned in to watch Monday Night Football, like I always do, being a football fan. This season so far (not on the field, but off the field stuff) has been one nightmare after another for me.
First ESPN goes and adds Michael Irvin to their pre-game team. OK, there’s a reason why I won’t watch ESPN. Then ESPN goes and adds Rush Freaking Limbaugh – I mean why him? This is NOT a football guy. Scratch ESPN from me watching ever. CBS still has Deion Sanders, so I won’t be watching there. I guess that leaves me with Fox, which I like, but I now only have just Fox, so that kind of bums me out.
However, the worst thing yet of any of them happened on Monday Night Football. But first, a little setup. I’m from Philadelphia, so I have a ‘home town thing’ for the Eagles. While I consider myself a fan of the sport first, I am an Eagle fan because I’m from there. For the last few years, MNF has done some shtick before each show, something relevant to the match-up of the night. And it’s usually funny, or at least good. And this one was, too. They had Sylvester Stallone in a boxing ring sparring with someone, or he was shown with a punching bag. At first I thought it was gonna be a Rocky piece, but it wasn’t. At least not overtly. It was well done I thought – no Mr T appearance, no Rocky theme song, and no appearance of Stallone on the steps of the art museum. All this was good, and I have to say after seeing that part, I was jazzed about the game even more at this point.
Traditionally, after the “shtick” they have the “Are you Ready for Some Football” song by Hank Williams, and that’s a cool intro, as well. However… ABC & MNF totally flushed the cool Stallone intro down the tubes as well as the entire rest of the season if this stays beyond week 1. And the horror here was that they had Hank Williams doing a duet of the Are you Ready for some Football song with BRITNEY FREAKING SPEARS! Oh my god, it was horrible. I know a lot of folks don’t care for the theme song to the new Star Trek series Enterprise, but this made that look like a Grammy award winner. Holy crap was Britney Spears so the WRONG THING here.
First off, the song does not need her kind of voice with it. Second, who exactly are they trying to appeal to here? A younger audience sure, but WHICH? Girls who like Britney Spears aren’t going to watch football. Guys of that age are going to be watching football anyway, and are unlikely to watch Britney Spears beyond the obvious reason of ogling her. I can’t believe this choice for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that she annihilated a song that was meant to get you up and ready for the show. Now it has the exact opposite. Use the commercial skip thing on my TiVo to go right by it. I’m HOPING that this is only for Week 1, but I have a feeling it’s not, in which case the entire intro for MNF has been flushed down the toilet. Nice work, guys.
Oh, and to make it even worse, during Al Michaels voice overs for ads during the return from commercial breaks, I caught Britney’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” in the background. Not only shouldn’t Spears’ music be there, but they picked one of her all time worst songs, too!
I think the Eagles heard this, and were so horrified, they didn’t play at all, they lost 17-0.