OK, so it took a while. As Ben Franklin said, “Make haste slowly.”
Just as we were about to give up on Fox’s lead NFL analyst, Troy Aikman, as incurably stiff, dull and speaker-of-the-obvious, he deadpans the best line of the football TV season.
Sunday, after the Packers’ Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams hooked up on a sweet pass and catch against the Panthers, Fox presented its latest full-screen, stupid stat graphic:
The “catch completion probability” of that play was “27.9 percent.” And that was Rodgers’ “11th completion with under 30 percent [probability].”
Naturally, Joe Buck, who’d read aloud his social security number and the recipe for Grandma Gretchen’s Cabbage Soup — “add two tablespoons, diced celery” — if they appeared in a graphic, parroted the words and numbers as if they were significant and accurate.