Can TV announcers PLEASE stop trying to be sports officials?  Given how frequently they are wrong about what they say regarding calls on the baseball and football fields, or basketball court (the three sports where the TV guys most frequently second guess decisions made by the officiating crews), we should add sports officials to the booth to help them get it right.

The problem is, the networks don’t hold them responsible.  And the average fan doesn’t know any better when it comes to the rules and their enforcement in these three major sports.

These guys drive me batty.  And make no mistake, it is mostly guys.  For some reason, I don’t see female announcers jumping in to judge the officials nearly as often, but that could be because they don’t have as many chairs in the announcing booths yet.  They could still catch up.

Here is just on recent example.  The New England Patriots were playing the New Orleans Saints in an NFL (National Football League for the uninitiated) game a few weeks back.  The Saints offense tried to draw the Patriots off sides by barking signals.

The offensive line moved, which signifies an illegal movement by that player, and means a five-yard penalty.  The two announcers, Troy Aikman and Thom Brennaman, decided with their massive expertise that this was the “wrong” call.

Aikman, in particular, mouthed off several times about how “bad” it was.  The movement was replayed 6-8 times.  Over and over and over, the video showed clearly that the officials on the field were correct in their ruling.

Did this stop Aikman from spewing?  Of course not.  He’s paid to be the expert.  He can say whatever he wants.  There is no one to stop him, no one to rein him in, no one to tell him he’s blind because he cannot see clearly what is going on down on the field.

Instead, the “blind” comments get reserved for the referees and umpires who actually saw the play, enforced the rule properly and kept the game under control.  Announcers like Aikman and Brennaman need to remember they are amateurs when it comes to officiating.

The chirping from the booths and sidelines against officials has grown increasingly antagonistic over the years, and when you have half-informed announcers pretending they know the rules, things are made worse.  They infect the fans because the fans think the announcers actually do know what they are talking about.

This is bad for sports, sports fans, and civil behavior in general.  A note to sports announcers:  Stop yapping on things which you know nothing about.  It only makes you look foolish.

Former NCAA college basketball announcer Billy Packer was the all-time worst.  I officiated college basketball for 12 years and have written on sports officiating issues for over 20 years.  At the height of Packard’s basketball announcing career, I was in the middle of my basketball officiating experience

Packer was a great announcer, but he also  pretended to be a rules guru.  It was nauseating when you listened to him explain rules to viewers as if he was the expert.  All he did was drive fans down the road of ignorance.

Current or former officials are the experts.  Television stations should hire them to be the experts.

Not only is the misapplication and misinterpretation of rules misleading to viewers, but it implies a license to criticize at length.  Sports announcers are paid to report on the game and give it some analysis.  Once they start acting like they know it all when it comes to rules and their enforcement, fans accept this “truth” and believe it.  The biggest danger from this is that once an incorrect statement is made, it’s not retracted, so it develops a life of its own, influencing others, and perpetuating further incorrect/inaccurate views about the ruling on the play.

Announcers should seek help from current and former officials about the rules and on-court actions.  If they want to have someone talk about it on the air, hire me.  I’m available.

As part of a work experiment, I drew a “Laugh-o-meter” on the grease board behind my chair.  The idea for this emerged as a coworker would come by on a semi-regular basis and he would make me repeatedly laugh, something that I believe is tremendously important to a healthy work environment.

We would get to talking and I started ranking the levels that he raised my laughs to.  “Oh man, you got me cracking up at about a 50 percentile rate.”  As this occurred over several weeks, the idea was hatched to begin charting the laugh-o-meter.

The concept is simple.  A drew a vertical rectangle, and as the day wears on, and laugher occurs, it gets colored in, with the time of day listed on the side to show the rising barometer. 

10:45 a.m., last week’s Saturday Night Live sketch on boys’ dancing is replayed with hand moves and rapping, raising the meter to the 35% range.  Later, after lunch, a story is told about camping and rain coming down so hard that a friend on a trip over the weekend ran to the car for protection, yelling she’d had enough.   Picturing the woman then texting messages, the car getting warmer because of her body heat and inability to roll down the windows because of the storm, got some more chuckles.  At 1:23 p.m., the laugh-o-meter got raised to 53% total for the day.

What began as an experiment became a challenge to keep humor going in the workplace.  That’s a lot of pressure to put on coworkers, but they’ve handled it reasonably well.

To add to the experiment (and remember that this is a totally non-scientific study, but still fascinating nonetheless), I began to chart the laugh-o-meter day-to-day.  Here’s where it starts to get even more enlightening about our daily behavior if you choose to believe this small, unrepresentative sample.

The first week, Monday was off the charts.  My coworker was extremely funny that day, poking fun at things, inventing skits.  Laugh-o-meter hit about 30% for the day. Tuesday was even better, as he came by several times to crack me up, sending the graph to its historical high of 78% (a perfect 100% would mean repeated full laughs throughout the day).  From there, it dipped the rest of the week, rising slightly out of the basement on Friday.

The next week was fairly similar, minus the blip on Tuesday.  Monday started out with some decent humor, then a downward trend until Friday, where it jumped a bit.

The following week, the trend continued, though my coworker was swamped, so percentages were down across the board.  His mammoth workload continued the week after that, and the dip on the laugh-o-meter forced it to its lowest levels of the month.

Charting the highs and lows yielded numbers and findings that are significant when you consider the ebb and flow of work.  First, Monday tended to have some of the best laughs.  Our operating theory is that residual humor is left over from the weekend, and we start the week fresh, so our humor antennas are more sensitive.

Second, humor tended to descend for the rest of the week, bottoming out on Wednesday and Thursday.  Again, this made sense in theory, as people get engaged in their jobs and busy and don’t take time to make someone else laugh. 

Finally, we get to Friday, where the laugh-o-meter showed a rising trend.   Our experts attributed this positive change to the impending weekend, as we begin seeking out more pleasure signals to prepare us for the fun on Saturday and Sunday.

To summarize: Monday – good; declines Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.  Improvement on Friday.

It sounds like our work week as we get settled, focus, buckle down, then release the steam, doesn’t it?  I wonder if I can get the government to fund this as a study?  We’ll improve business productivity exponentially with our findings.

There are so many things to feel good about in our daily lives that it’s almost difficult to know where to start. That may sound odd given how much negativity is portrayed in the media – all the things not working, arguments, impasses, systems breaking down. 

Here’s something to consider:  When you hear about something bad on the TV news, see if what happens directly affects you. Has it changed your life?  Does it do something to you personally?   If it doesn’t, file it away, and count your blessings.


By all means, do your share.  Get involved when an issue is important to you.  Volunteer time.  Help others.  But remember that you can only do your share.  Then think about all the positives.

Here’s one.  The other day, as I was driving to work, there was a car pinned in to my left, and the driver wanted to get in front of me.  My lane was dense as well, and it was rush hour and everyone wanted to get to work as fast as possible, kind of an odd syndrome (sarcasm).

It was a nice day.  I had my window down, my arm hanging outside.  I slowed down, waved my arm for the car to get ahead of me, and he pulled in.  He signaled the thumbs up to me when he got settled in front of my car.  I beamed.  It made my day.

Little things like that happen on all the time.  These types of incidents connect us to others, remind us that reaching out and touching someone, even somewhat anonymously as was the case here, is something that enhances your life.

After I waved back at the guy, l floated on air the rest of the commute.  I hope he passed it on.

My dad plays a lot of golf.  He hacks things up.  That means he digs a lot of turf, the toupees of grass flying down the fairway.

Golfers are supposed to replace these divots.  Most of the time we do so, and we feel good about this.  My dad takes it a step further.

He takes the canister of sand mixed with grass seed that is left on tee boxes of Par 3 holes and also often available on the golf carts, and will fill in multiple divots while he is waiting to hit.  This gives him a good feeling.  It’s something that generates positive thoughts.  After he does it, he’ll say something like, “I guess I’ve secured my place in heaven now.”



Perhaps he is right.  Maybe god is looking down on those little things and seeing how we act.  Do we demonstrate a small act of kindness to repair the earth?  Regardless of how it is perceived, it’s another thing to feel good about.  Try it the next time you are on the course.

When our mom was alive, she would take regular walks near our parents’ home in Topeka, KS.  This dated back to long before “walking” became popular.  She was an outdoor person, enjoying the air and exercise.  She also cared about her surroundings.


That extended to the garbage so many people carelessly fling out their windows.  As she walked, she would pick up the stray cans, bottles and wrappers that had made their way into the trenches along the road where my parents lived.  She’d get home, recycle what she could and put the rest in the garbage where it belonged.  I’m sure it made her feel good.  It certainly made the street they lived on look good, and there’s a lot to be said for that – respecting and caring about your local environment.

We all have the capacity for these small good deeds every single moment of every day.  They make us smile, feel better and remember we connect to others in seemingly insignificant ways that hold the promise of significant joy.