I never really understood why Mose from The Office hated Joe Morgan so much until I heard Tony Dungy as a football color commentator this season. Michael Schur, under the alias Ken Tremendous, and some friends spent years writing about all the dumb stuff baseball analyst Joe Morgan said on ESPN broadcasts. They even named their website Fire Joe Morgan.
I’m certain that the feelings of supreme annoyance stirred up in me by Dungy’s awful commentating are the same as what inspired Schur and company all those years ago. And while The Touchback won’t turn into a website dedicated to pointing out the follies of Dungy, he is the freaking worst football color commentator out there. He’s not great on Football Night in America, but at least there he is confined to a studio show no one really watches. On the other hand, three hours of Dungy is brutal.
The Wild Card game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Washington Football Team saw Dungy hold a clinic on how not to be an NFL color commentator. It was a spectacle the world hasn’t seen since Dennis Miller was loitering in the Monday Night Football booth. Let’s relive the lowlights.
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Tony Dungy might be Taylor Heinicke’s dad
We know Dungy hates Tom Brady. However, his ridiculous praise of Taylor Heinicke was borderline unprofessional. Even overbearing Little League dads had to think it was a bit much. Washington Football Team was down 18-7 in the first half but you wouldn’t know it by what the former Indianapolis Colts Head Coach was saying about the WFT backup quarterback.
Heinicke was literally 5-11 with an interception and a touchdown, but you’d think he was in the midst of a record setting outing the way Dungy was drooling over him. He must have used the words Taylor Heinicke and impressed in the same sentence at least 200 times. What made it all the more worse was the fact Brady was doing much. Dungy, of course, refused to acknowledge this.
Tony Dungy complimenting Taylor Heinicke and Tom Brady at roughly a 30-1 ratio is the funniest thing of the day.
— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) January 10, 2021
Instant replay is ruining the game
When Heinicke threw a touchdown pass to Steven Sims Jr. (his only one of the night by the way) in the fourth quarter, the replay booth wanted to take a look at the play. It appeared Sims had bobbled the ball and honestly, it could have easily been overturned because it kind of looked like he lost possession. At the very least, there was no harm in a review.
Unless you’re Tony Dungy, who busted out a full ‘get off my lawn’ type rant about how he disliked replay. He literally said that instant replay wasn’t made for plays like Sims’ catch when that is exactly why the NFL implemented it. Apparently the only plays that should be reviewed are the ones that meet Dungy’s arbitrary standard of worthiness. You can check some of it out here:
A lot of words to say nothing
There are countless occasions when Tony Dungy is doing color commentary but it’s just talking without saying anything of note. Why is this on TV? It’s sort of like a high school kid doing a speech that needs to be a certain length in time. Eventually, it just devolves into repeating stuff he or she already said slightly different than before or simply stating the obvious.
That is all Dungy does for 90 percent of the broadcast. There are no insights or interesting stories. If you didn’t know any better, you would think he has only watched football on television all his life. Jon Gruden may have been annoying as hell, but at least he would show off some knowledge now and then to prove his credentials. You never get that kind of knowledge from Dungy. He’s nothing but platitudes, Tom Brady dislike and the occasional bad take.
