NOTRE DAME? AH, A FRENCH TEAM
Ah, so close to our dream of Ian Darke calling a college football game with zero preparation. Which brings us to the point we want to make here: now that ESPN has done the BCS MEGACAST, and did so pretty successfully, there is no reason why Ian Darke can't do exactly this.
We missed the whole thing via the inconvenience of actually being there for once, but after watching just the film room replay of the game and checking out a few of the alternate feeds, it works. Not for everyone, no, but it works in the sense that people browse their way through games anyway, and watch with at least one other screen open. (See: twitter dot com, which can get so engrossing on game day that you end up paying attention to games you'd otherwise never watch a second of at all.)
Imagine this. Recall the moment when Eminem appeared in the booth with Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit. Now, imagine that three minutes transferred to an entire channel where instead of three minutes, you get the B-team announcers and/or a completely different host struggling with Detroit's most noted famous naked mole rat for an entire hour of unspeakable weirdness. Imagine this not on the title game, but on a random Saturday night in the fall, done strictly as an extra for those who not only hope between games, but would like to hop around within the bounds of the same broadcast.
Better still, imagine the Waldorf and Statler channel, i.e. the EDSBS channel, where Celebrity Hot Tub and ourselves simply narrate the game for you while polishing off a tumbler of brandy and eating Popeye's on air. What does this cost? Next to nothing, especially the Celebrity Hot Tub and ourselves part. We don't even get paid in money, but barter is amazing if you practice it enough without starving to death.
Or finally, imagine a channel where Ian Darke and a good former coach are bantering back and forth about the game and saying whatever comes to mind. We're so freaking close to this happening for real, and that's before we mention the possibility of a channel featuring Chris Spielman just going 100 mph with coachspeak and disappointed sighs at poor technique and missed assignments.