Reading up on the change of duties for Michele Tafoya and Suzy Kolber in the Mundane Night Football crew (read: They’ll be on TV less often), I stumbled on this:
P.S.: Sunday, Soltys also said the contracts of ABC/ESPN college football announcers Dan Fouts and Tim Brant, who worked together on West Coast games, have expired and won’t be renewed.
I never really had a problem with Fouts as a broadcaster, at least insofar as thinking he really had it out for ND. Readers could probably give me a litany of reasons to believe that Fouts clearly had an agenda, but I just don’t remember him very well. Perhaps that was his problem. I thought he was serviceable as a color guy, but I was completely dumbfounded the first time I heard him to play-by-play. I kept thinking the real play-by-play guy had keeled over right next to Fouts and was dying by his side, which would explain Fouts’ distracted way of explaining every third or fourth event occurring on the field.
Fouts, when he did manage to describe a play, tended to deliver the information like a twice divorced high school history teacher who only managed to show up to school each day because his pension would be taking effect in just a few years and he didn’t mind passing time ogling the young girls. Consistently placing emphasis on the wrong syllables, Fouts was his most confused and mystified when doing Notre Dame games on the west coast, as mapping jersey numbers to names in his head seemed to take the form of a cruel joke. My one clear memory of him as play-by-play man was when he announced “Brady Quinn on the tackle,” after a Tom Zbikowski play. Perhaps he was sacked often as a player.
- HLS Tweets for the Week of 2009-11-15 - November 15, 2009
- HLS Tweets for the Week of 2009-11-08 - November 8, 2009
- HLS Tweets for the Week of 2009-11-01 - November 1, 2009