Budding media superstar Jason Kelce paid an extended visit to the Monday Night Football booth during last night’s Falcons-Eagles game. The move surely thrilled Eagles fans.
And infuriated those partial to the Falcons.
Partisan fans (i.e., all fans) often spend much of their time scrutinizing every word uttered by those working a given game, searching for any evidence that a talking head “hates” their team. They routinely ignore the good and obsess over the bad, often twisting innocuous comments into an indication that the broadcasters are “for” the other team.
Falcons fans didn’t need tinfoil hats last night. As many have said (including Devin McCourty on Tuesday’s PFT Live), Kelce’s presence made it feel like an Eagles preseason broadcast.
Kelce is great, and his talents (in my view) are wasted on a pregame show. He could become an excellent game analyst. But jamming him into the booth for only the second Eagles game played without him will only anger those who follow the other team,
By the time things got really interesting, that’s when Kelce should have been in the booth. Wouldn’t it have been great to hear what he had to say about the decision to pass on third and three from the Atlanta 10 with less than two minutes to play and the Falcons out of timeouts? Would he have been critical, or would he have been a (former) company man?
Why not have him on standby for the postgame show? It would have been a perfect opportunity for Kelce to give raw, real commentary about why the Eagles did what they did. And whether they should have done something differently.
Kelce probably is glad he wasn’t in position to comment on the situation. If he’d defended the Eagles, many would have rolled their eyes. If he’d called out the coaching decision, he might have gotten a little blowback from his former team.
That’s the real test for Kelce. Can he risk pissing off the only team for which he ever played — and risk inviting the ire of Philly fans — by speaking the unvarnished truth, as he sees it?
First, he has to rewire his brain to see it, shifting from “we” to “they.” And realizing that his primary duty is now to the audience.
