The sorry state of 'Monday Night Football'—a review in four quarters

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Monday Night used to be something special. When it debuted in 1970, and for decades thereafter, it was the lone weekly primetime showcase for NFL football. The singular platform of Monday Night gave games a special charge. The splendid opening titles for that first season in 1970 showcased the awesome human and technological effort of the ABC production truck, zoomed in on a TV screen in the control room, and transitioned to a slideshow of football action as seen through the scanlines of a cathode-ray tube. These images spoke to an attitude that became part of Monday Night’s DNA: The broadcast is the real event, more so than the game itself.

For a long time, this swagger was justified. Monday Night was the one game every week that pitched itself to a nationwide audience; there was no regular-season experience quite like it. But now there is Thursday Night Football, and NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which gets dibs on the top-tier matchups that used to be Monday Night’s stock-in-trade. Once, Monday Night was the climax of an NFL week. Now it often feels like a last gasp.

Monday Night isn’t special anymore, but the production never formed a new identity to contend with that reality. So there’s a lot of pretending. We all must pretend it matters when, say, a running back gains more yards in the third quarter of a Monday Night Football game than anyone has before. It’s not clear why the Monday Night-ness of an achievement matters to anyone in 2019—though, did it ever? Regardless, part of the lore of Monday Night Football is that the lore of Monday Night Football is very important indeed.

Tessitore honors the Monday Night legend with zeal. He pretends harder than anyone else. Last season’s Chiefs-Rams game was an electric 54-51 thriller that ranks among the best regular-season contests ever, and Tessitore did the play-by-play. Here is a game that an announcer would dream of, one where the action on the field provides all the material you could need. All he had to do was call the plays.

Yet even as a gripping back-and-forth fourth quarter unfolded, Tessitore kept retreating from the moment and reverting to empty storylines—the “hype” that was being validated, the “energy” in the stadium before kickoff, and above all the Monday Night history being made. As the total points on the scoreboard neared an all-time NFL record, Tessitore said that viewers could “forget the conversation of highest-scoring Monday Night Football game of all time,” a conversation nobody but Tessitore was having.

Tessitore is dedicated to huffing and puffing on the embers of Monday Night’s aura, and that is a big part of why he has his job. His misguided desperation to inflate small moments is an echo of Monday Night’s general desperation to seem bigger than it is. His schmaltz is a salve for the show’s deepest insecurities. Without him, Monday Night Football might have to stop pretending.
When Monday Night analyst Booger McFarland was relegated to the aforementioned “Boogermobile” last year, I saw it as an indignity. This was mostly because it would be hard for anyone to look dignified in a Beverly Hillbillies jalopy made of television screens, let alone someone named Booger. But more to the point, Booger often chimed in with illuminating observations on key defensive plays. Given that Tessitore and his 2018 booth partner—a cardboard cutout of Jason Witten—had such dreadfully scant insight to offer, it felt unjust for Booger to be treated as the third wheel, on wheels. He was the only one adding any substance to the telecast!

Booger’s move up to the booth in 2019 is an upgrade from Witten, to be sure. But the promotion has also shown that the Boogermobile was more of a boon to its eponymous occupant than anyone realized. Down on the sidelines, he had the luxury of chiming in only when he had something to say. Upstairs, he’s expected to extemporize on every play. He struggles with the unrelenting pace at times. This Monday, Booger reacted to a big Patriots offensive play by marveling aloud that he had no idea why a Jets defensive back had blown the coverage. “I just don’t know what he was doing there,” Booger kept saying. As an analyst, when you are unable to analyze a play, it’s best not to loudly dwell on the matter.

Booger is not the problem with Monday Night, but he isn’t a solution to the broadcast’s identity crisis, either. My selfish desire is for Monday Night Football to rejuvenate itself by embracing whimsy. The production already has traces of silly fun, a looser spirit that occasionally shines through in pre-produced packages, like a statistical snapshot of the New England defense that aired this week.