Mike Carey gets dumped on with regularity. It's wince-inducing, but ultimately fair — he's an ex-referee in the booth whose job is, ostensibly, to serve as a ready-made appeal to authority on controversial calls. Counterituitively, he's most successful at creating more controversy.
It's a tough gigs for sure, and Charey has also got a lot of room to grow, if you want to be charitable. CBS Sports president Sean McManus, as he should, defended Carey in an interview with Awful Announcing ahead of Super Bowl 50.
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If this sort of thing interests you, it's all worth a read, but this quote stood out:
“It seems to me sometimes okay if the announcers or the fans or the analysts disagree, but when Mike says something differently, he gets an awful lot of heat because he doesn’t necessarily agree with what the end result is and I think people sort of had mistakenly assumed his job is only to predict what’s going to happen and I think sometimes he has a position and I’ve said to him, ‘What I want you to say is how you would call this if you were on the field.