Sports on TV: Sorry, Cougars, you're doomed

Brace yourself, BYU fans. The Cougars are doomed.

Kirk Herbstreit has given them the kiss of death. The ESPN football "expert" (and I use that term loosely) not only voted BYU No. 5 in this week's AP poll, but he talked about the possibility they could end up playing in the national championship game.

Doomed, I tell you.

Herbstreit, of course, picked Oklahoma to beat BYU "big" on "College GameDay."

Not that I blame him. I thought the same thing.

But of the eight games Herbstreit picked on "GameDay," he got two right. Two. You'd do better flipping a coin.

Fellow ESPN "expert" Lee Corso went 3-6. (Herbstreit didn't make a pick on the Alabama-Virginia Tech because he worked that game later on Saturday.) Embarrassingly, guest "expert" Chipper Jones (of the Atlanta Braves) beat them both by going 4-5.

And now Herbstreit, who has so often denigrated the Cougars, has jumped on the BYU bandwagon.

They're doomed. Doomed.

WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT? It's possible that Coleby Clawson has become the most-seen-in-clips Cougar in BYU football history.

Yeah, I know he has yet to achieve the fame of, say, Jim McMahon, Steve Young or Ty Detmer. But when those guys were playing college football, there weren't 24-hour news and sports networks.

And, at last count, the clip of Clawson tackling Sooner QB Sam Bradford has aired, oh, about a billion times.

MTN. SLIDE: In the aftermath of the Utah-Utah State game last week, I was, predictably, inundated with e-mails complaining about the quality of the broadcast.

No. 1 on the list remains the lack of an HD signal. And, yes, that stinks. Absolutely. As I've written here before, we're going to have to put up with it for now. There are no HD games until November.

No. 2 on the list was the broadcast team of James Bates and Todd Christensen. And, again, I have to agree. They've gone from bad to worse.

And even if we allow for the growing pains of technology, sometimes it seems like The mtn. is just serving up softballs for its critics to hit over the fence.

Did you see that incredibly lame promo with Bates and Christensen on the back of a scooter? Geez, wouldn't it have been easier just to run a graphic declaring, "We're bush league and we stink"?

But the extended, fawning phone interview Bates and Christensen conducted with Florida Coach Urban Meyer was beyond bad and downright aggravating. They completely ignored four consecutive plays on the field, barely mentioned a fifth, then ignored another while they licked Meyer's boots. After Meyer got off the phone, Bates and Christensen ignored two more plays while they continued to gush about him.