Really bad radio – the first 36 laps of the Indy 500 was about 2 minutes of coverage and 34 laps of commercials. A large portion of the non-commercial time is being spent reading the list of affiliates (supposedly) covering the race.
The Indy folks have learned from NASCAR how to create intentional breaks in the race so that the TV and radio networks can get in lots of long commercial breaks. Back in my youth, only radio carried the race live. TV didn’t have the rights to carry the race live and/or needed to tape delay the race to edit in the commercials.
But what really pushed me to write this – how unaware do you have to be to host radio coverage of a sporting event and constantly say “Let’s look at the replay”…. Are you even at the track or doing the coverage from New York? Even if you have to rely on the TV to see what happened, people on radio don’t have the TV on… (with a few hard core exceptions)… I believe we are at the point where most network radio people have no clue how to cover sports for radio. Here is a hint: pretend you’re describing it to a blind person.
