Thanks for the soccer, KUTV, but ...

I'm reluctant to offer any criticism of KUTV's coverage of last week's Real Salt Lake season-opener, because I don't want to sound ungrateful.

And, along with a lot of soccer fans, I'm very grateful that Ch. 2 will air 24 RSL games this season.

(That's two on the main Ch. 2 channel; 22 on the about-to-launch digital channel 2.2.)

So … thanks KUTV! Thank you very much!

But — and you knew there was going to be a but — soccer is not football. It's not basketball. And you can't telecast soccer the way you direct football or basketball.

The problem there comes in two very fixable areas. First, you don't want so many close-up camera angles on individual players while the ball is in play. While you're focused on some guy running down the field — or, worse yet, some guy just standing there — you're missing the game. And so are your viewers.

And, unless play is stopped, you can't be showing a lot of replays. I can pretty much guarantee that if all 24 games on KUTV this season have as many replays as the season-opener did, you're going to miss a goal at some point.

But, hey, thanks again for all the soccer!

I'M ALSO THRILLED that Sen. Orrin Hatch is taking on the Bowl Championship Series.

If he can do anything to help bring down college football's Axis of Evil, it might be the greatest accomplishment of his legislative career.

(Not that I have anything against the BCS or anything.)

But I'm also a little worried that Hatch will run on at the mouth and start talking about things he doesn't understand, making himself look, well, uninformed is the most polite way to put it.

And that will undermine him as the spokesman of the Forces of Good aligned against the Axis of Evil.

For example, appearing on radio station KZNS AM-1280 (aka The Zone) earlier this week, Hatch railed against the "elitism" of the BCS and drew a comparison to the Utah Jazz.

"I get very resentful (about) the way the Jazz are treated because we are a small TV market," Hatch said. "You don't see them on national TV very often, yet they are one of the premier teams in the whole doggone game."

That, unfortunately, is just, well, uninformed. It's the proverbial apples and oranges.