At a time when many believe that people who cover sports should stick to sports, a prominent sports commentator made an unusual and gratuitous political reference during Monday night’s NFL broadcast.
“It’s just gone too far with that rule,” ESPN’s Jason Witten said regarding the NFL’s enhanced emphasis on roughing the passer. “I knew they wanted to make it about the health and safety and protect these quarterbacks. It just seems like we just went a little bit to the left wing on that, you know, with our approach of trying to protect it because as we said not only are the players frustrated but the coaches, they don’t know how to coach this. That’s when you have a challenge with this rule.”
First, it’s unclear why he regards aggressive and zealous enforcement of rules to be a “left wing” tendency. Some would say that this falls within the scope of the staunch law-and-order emphasis the characterizes conservative politics.
Second, if Witten believes that emphasis on player health and safety is a “left wing” priority, what is he saying about the right wing mindset? That persons with those views don’t care about player health and safety?
Third, and perhaps most importantly, it was unwise for Witten to utter left wing, right wing, or any wing other than single wing while broadcasting a football game. Fifteen years after the failed Rush Limbaugh experiment at ESPN, it’s more clear now than ever that folks don’t want their football served with a side of politics. It’s one thing to cover the efforts of those in the sport to inject politics into the sport; it’s quite another to take something apolitical and force a political narrative onto it, even though ESPN is now taking the position that Witten’s comment had nothing to do with politics. (Maybe he thought he was covering a hockey game.)
And maybe it’s good for Witten that he simply blurted out “left wing” and didn’t elaborate on his reasoning. If he had, there’s a chance his stint at ESPN would have ended up being as short as Limbaugh’s.