It was a new CBS broadcast tandem on Sunday afternoon when the Baltimore Ravens hosted the Carolina Panthers.
Greg Gumbel has been a staple of the CBS team since 2005, the number 2 play-by-play man for the network. Gumbel was handcuffed with the worst analyst in the history of sports, Dan Dierdorf, since 2006. Dierdorf retired at the end of last season and has been replaced by Trent Green.
CBS started off the broadcast with a goosebump-worthy story about Steve Smith Sr. before the game kicked off. I thought it was well done, it didn’t go over the top and wasn’t super corny which those types of stories all too often become.
The Ravens went to Sr early and often and things got chippy pretty quickly.
Trent Green seemed like he was rooting for some sort of Personal Foul call so that he could go on the mandatory “You gotta be smarter than that” rant. It didn’t happen, in fact, Panthers players looked as though they were trying to instigate the issue.
As we all know, Steve Smith changed that story line quick, very quick. He lit that story line on fire and wrote one for the history books. I thought Gumbel and Green paid the story line a fair amount of attention and didn’t go overboard considering what Sr. did on the day was absolutely incredible.
The former journeyman QB, Trent Green, had a good piece of analysis when hitting the subject of the short passing game. Green noted that James Hurst, an undrafted rookie was starting at left tackle, so to get him comfortable the Ravens would start out with a lot of short-quick passes.
DeAngelo Williams went down late in the second half, leaving the Panthers with a pair of young RB’s. Trent did a good job explaining the disadvantage to the Panthers in that the Ravens can blitz more freely in this situation and force the young backs to pass protect thus leaving Cam Newton free to get (more) beaten up.
Overall I thought Green was a huge upgrade over Dan Dierdorf and did a pretty solid job explaining things from a quarterback’s perspective.
Side Notes:
-Greg Gumbel called the Ravens kicker Graham Gano not once, but twice. There should be a public apology made to Justin Tucker for such an offense. (Easy mix-up, Gano was a Raven at a point in time)
-Evan Washburn, the sideline reporter, looks like he should be the GOP’s Presidential candidate.
-4 weeks into the season, I LOVE Bart Scott during the “Game Breaks”
-Greg Gumbel seems like he genuinely enjoys coming to Baltimore.
– In the past during inter-conference games if the host city was part of the AFC, Fox would broadcast the game. Conversely if the host city was a NFC team CBS would broadcast the game. Apparently things have changed a bit given the fact that CBS handled this past week’s Panthers at Ravens.
This season, for the first time, a select number of games are being “cross-flexed,” moving between CBS and FOX to bring potentially under-distributed games to wider audiences. The Ravens/Panthers game was one.
