Here are random thoughts that I had while watching NBC’s new Football Night in America, their Sunday-night highlights-and-commentary show that precedes their Sunday night game:

1. This is a 75-minute show. They went 15 minutes before showing the first highlight. WTF?! The only explanation that I have for it is to avoid showing highlights against the 4:00 p.m. ET starts that sometimes go past three hours. That said, if this is your intention, I as a viewer want to know that. 12 minutes in, I was wondering, “Is this just going to be another damn Bob Costas Olympic-style broadcast?” Then, on the teaser heading to the break, they discussed that they’d go to highlights next. Almost too late for me: however, I’d TiVo’d the thing, so I was ready to bail.
2. The one good thing about the first segment: they did an around-the-league with their on-site reporters bringing you the top news. It had just enough football to keep you mildly interested.
3. The group seemed relaxed and together, but almost too much so for a first show. Any show like this—especially one where the cast sits on leather chairs out from behind desks and essentially is inviting you into their living room—needs to develop its camraderie slowly. This felt like walking into a locker room full of veteran players: intimidating, awkward, and a little off-putting. I’m not asking for stilted, but I am asking for slow development.
4. Sterling Sharpe’s honed repartee didn’t fit in so well with Cris Collinsworth and Jerome Bettis as it did with Steve Young, Tom Jackson, and Michael Irvin. In fact, I felt at times like Sharpe was expecting Costas to pull a Chris Berman on him, which … say what you will about Costas, but he doesn’t have the big man bombast that Berman has. [That's mostly a good thing.] Costas, the professional TV guy, is purely there to guide the broadcast and keep things going.
5. That said, do we really even need Costas? Collinsworth is such a polished TV guy that you could probably get him to play the gig pretty straight and have him lead the coverage. Now, I’m not one of these guys that says that I want only players doing commentary—I think outsiders can pick up on things that players don’t—but … when I think Costas, I think baseball and Olympics.

If you’ve read all that and feel that I’m disappointed in the offering, you’d be right. Even the highlights were just … mediocre. I preferred what NFL Primetime brought to the game: the fast-paced music, the feeling of drama, etc. ESPN had all the cues in the broadcast—done on the fly by people who were just that good—that let you know to start paying attention again if you’d been distracted by something else going on in the room. I never got that feeling with Football Night in America; it never really drew me back in.

I’m going to sample ESPN’s Monday night offering and see which I like; I’m fine with waiting a day for a pre-packaged highlight show. Frankly, I’m curious to see how stunning ESPN can make theirs with a day to do film work and cutdowns on timing.