Guerrero Canned, A Grateful Nation Rejoices

If you’re like me, you enjoy a little SportsCenter a few times a day. (Editorial Aside: Not to worry, ladies. I’m not some beer-swilling trogolodyte. I tend to speak in full sentences rather than grunts. I don’t use “fuckin’” to fill in pregnant pauses. I’ve never advised a friend to have sex with an ugly girl by using the logic, “You don’t fuck her face.” I hate beer commercials. I hope this evidence is sufficient for you to trust me on this one.) So, anyway, I was watching SportsCenter this morning and I saw that Lisa Guerrero had been “let go” (in my office when someone gets canned we get an email saying, “So-and-so has left to pursue other professional opportunities.”) by ABC and relieved of her Monday Night Football duties. I think I speak for most football fans when I say, “It’s about fucking time.” In this case, I feel the profanity is warranted.

It’s insulting to men in general, but especially football fans, to think that some TV exec asshole got several other TV exec assholes to see the logic in hiring some eye-candy to stand on the sidelines in earmuffs to ask perfectly inane questions to the coaches and players. If you watched any MNF at all last year surely you were struck by the obvious: that Lisa Guerrero knows VERY LITTLE about football. Sure, you could hand her a children’s book and she could correctly identify the brown, oblong ball as a football among the golf ball, the baseball and the shuttlecock. Yes, I believe she could pick most of the NFL superstars out of a police lineup. Some day she may need to. My point is, I do believe she has a cursory knowledge of the game but that’s about it.

(Another aside: I’ll grant you that she was no worse than Eric Dickerson. Clearly Dickerson knows the game, but watching him was pure torture. Seeing him try to form the words necessary to explain some complex football concept was like watching chimps try to figure out how to stack the orange crates to reach the banana hanging from the ceiling. Michael Irvin is much, much worse. Come to think of it, Bradshaw’s terrible too, but I digress.)

Finally, ABC is hiring the right person for the job: Michele Tafoya. Here they get the best of all worlds: they get a woman, they get a woman that’s not hard to look at (she’s no Stark, but she’s not Burke either), they get a woman that’s not hard to look at that actually knows a thing or two about football. I’m glad someone at the network finally stumbled onto the concept that all football fans really want is someone knowledgeable, first and foremost. If it’s a woman, that’s fine. If she’s hot, that’s even better. But, in this case, two outta three IS bad.

I guess my whole point is that it really pisses me off that Guerrero ever got the job in the first place. In my mind it’s clear (whether the network will admit it or not) that ABC chose style over substance. It’s condescending to all men when we get Barbie foisted upon us as if we won’t notice that she has very little to say when you pull her string. Sure, she’s kinda hot, but she’s dumber than a brick. It’s sad commentary that men have allowed themselves to become the lowest common denominator because we (and I mean as a large group) do leer at the twins with the short shorts and we do laugh at those ridiculous beer commercials. We keep buying that crap and THE MAN keeps selling it to us. The whole thing just bugs me.