What Fox has done is atrocious.  They paid millions of dollars for the right to broadcast the BCS until 2010 and you have not yet squandered a chance to ruin it. From shoddy announcing, poor production, general ass-hattedness and sheer idiocy, they run the gamut and then some. It’s stunning, really.

College football as a sport gets more and more popular every year, which has led to wall-to-wall coverage of everything from the recruiting process to training camp to winter camp to spring practice to the draft. They even manage to mix some actual games in there. So, with all of this on our plates, I find it hard to believe that Fox can pull off the kind of bone-headed broadcasts that they have compiled so far. They bring in announcers who mispronounce names, confuse the rules, underplay the entirety of the season- all because they simply must not care. They have a production value that equates to the local community television station. Even the information bar at the top of the screen- you know the one with the score, clock and down and distance, the most basic thing in the world- lacks the amount of timeouts that each team possesses as well as the play clock, two vital parts of the game. But, they have room to use more than half of the bar for either advertising or self-promotion.

Then there’s the band shots…

Band shots. Fox loves them some band shots. I read an article a few years back where the head of production for the BCS on Fox said that he boiled the major difference between college and pro football to be the bands. College teams have bands that play the school song, etc. Therefore, that was what Fox was going to emphasize in their broadcasts. So, ever since, we have had to suffer through a cavalcade of band shots in-between quick glimpses of the actual game.

The fact that their big answer to understanding college football is the bands and the bands alone is utterly insulting to the average fan. It’s like me being put in production of a NASCAR broadcast and insisting that the drunken yokels in Miller Lite trucker hats, with their pale, shirtless, flabby bellies hanging over their barely visible belt buckles, are the most important thing about the “sport” and I insisted on cutting to shots of them during the entire race. There’s so much more to college football’s atmosphere and personality than just the band and I’m relatively sure that there’s something more to NASCAR aside from rednecks…relatively sure.

This year was no exception. Thom Brennaman and Charles Davis managed to get the down and distance wrong on more than one occasion without acknowledging or apologizing for their mistake. They mispronounced player’s names, called the wrong names for ballcarriers and, well, there’s no other way to say it- they blew Tim’s Tebow. They sucked it long and they sucked it hard.

Look, Fox, we get it. Tim Tebow is every mother’s dream and every father’s pride and joy. He craps Gideon Bibles, burps Febreeze and bleeds Aquafina. He helped circumcise 3rd world babies and would probably hold the door open for a girl on the first date. On the football field, he’s the most unstoppable force ever, in the history of the game-no, in the history of ANY game- no, in the history of the world. He could make opposing players part like the red sea, but he chooses not to, because he wants to punish them for their transgressions. Then, he helps them up and reminds them that God loves them.

Good, sweet baby Jesus, he’s the balls.

Or at least Brennaman thinks so. He was undressing Tebow with his eyes from the first moment of the broadcast and proceeded to go on a four-hour stalker-type rant that only he only paused every now and again to point out how awful of human beings the Oklahoma Sooners are. I haven’t seen such blatant fellating since the last time Bill Clinton was…you get the point.

It was embarrassing to listen to and should immediately disqualify Fox from broadcasting any sporting event for five years, or until they decide that people calling the game should actually know something rudimentary about it. I’m no huge fan of the hegemony, but I’ll be more than happy to see ESPN take over the broadcasting of the BCS in 2011.

Oh yeah, and Florida won, 24-14.