The first reaction was it must be fake news.
Bill Walton announcing a college football game?
And not just any game … Monday’s national championship rematch between Alabama and Clemson.
Walton’s “ESPN Voices” call with Keyshawn Johnson will be on ESPNU, and a “Homers Telecast” on ESPN2 features former players from both teams. That’s just part of ESPN’s all-out MegaCast from its myriad platforms. Viewers have more options than the offenses run in the Army-Navy game.
If you like weird you’re in luck. Broadcasting doesn’t get any more bizarre than Bill Walton — and that’s when he’s working basketball, the sport he actually knows something about.
He goes off on more tangents than a trigonometry instructor, which is just part of what can make him difficult to work with for broadcast partners — sometimes they’re the butts of Walton’s esoteric and mean-spirited humor. Johnson’s unlikely to just sit and take it, so this one might not go the distance. Anyone know the Vegas odds on a knockout?
It would be a fitting way to cap a college football postseason that has provided theater of the absurd off the field, upstaged only at times by Duke basketball bad boy Grayson Allen’s trippy behavior.
The bowl games themselves have been mostly entertaining and exciting … including a Rose Bowl between USC and Penn State actually worthy of the title “epic,” which is otherwise overused in epic proportions.
So, it’s all added up to a month of the good, the bad and the ugly.
Who knows what Monday in Tampa will bring? As much as he might pretend he does — or wish he does — Nick Saban does not.
When the Alabama head coach mutually decided with himself it was finally time for offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin to go, it was less than a week before go time against Clemson.
Kiffin is that guy who never exits a job graciously, and Saban had to know that. Oakland Raiders, Tennessee, USC … there was a definite trend. The smart thing would have been to get him out of Tuscaloosa as soon as he accepted the head-coaching gig at Florida Atlantic.
Now, the Tide are left with Steve Sarkisian to call the plays. Of course, it was obvious since September, when Alabama hired him as an offensive “analyst,” this was going to happen eventually, whenever Kiffin jumped ship or was pushed.
To add to the strangeness, Sarkisian became USC’s head coach in 2014 after Kiffin was fired in 2013, but then Sarkisian was fired midway through the 2015 season due to alcohol problems.
Some say it’s a big distraction and disruptive. But Kiffin was off his play-calling game in the semifinal against Washington (turns out it didn’t really matter). So maybe the new distraction is better than the old distraction of him being around as a lame-duck OC.
All of that can be pretty entertaining if you’re not a ’Bama fan and you’d be happy to see what has become the Derek Jeter-era New York Yankees of college football get taken down a notch.
Some of the other weirdness of the bowl season, though, has not been as harmlessly amusing as Walton being Walton or Kiffin being Kiffin.
Coaches Tracy Claeys of Minnesota and Bob Stoops of Oklahoma both tried to deal with issues involving their players abusing female students.
Claeys was fired for supporting his team in its misguided threat to boycott the Holiday Bowl after 10 players were suspended amid sexual assault allegations.
Stoops still has his job after a video was released from two years ago showing running back Joe Mixon breaking the jaw and cheekbone of coed Amelia Molitor with a punch. Mixon was suspended for the 2014 season (but he redshirted and did not lose eligibility). He was also suspended for a game after he allegedly ripped up a parking ticket and threw it at an attendant last November.
Mixon rushed for 91 yards and two touchdowns in Oklahoma’s Sugar Bowl win, but his on-field performance was overshadowed as teammates celebrated by throwing air-punches at him in what clearly appeared to be mockery of the punch that put Molitor in a hospital. Announcer Brent Musburger fueled online outrage by wishing Mixon a successful NFL career, with no mention of the victim.
College football is not the better for it when Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey — who opted out of their teams’ finales to save themselves for the NFL — do not play in a bowl game, but Joe Mixon does.
