■ 11 March 2009 | 10:11 PM
Did you notice? Last month, former quarterback Joe Theismann was the guest speaker at the Norfolk Sports Club jamboree. Wednesday night, former quarterback Ron Jaworski was the guest speaker at the Portsmouth Sports Club jamboree.
Theismann was bounced a couple years ago as an analyst from ESPN’s Monday Night Football. Guess who took his place? Jaworski.
That means nothing at all, really. I just found it quirky. Oh, and I also find Jaworski’s work is far superior to Theismann’s.
Anyway, Jaworski, 57, predictably was a good interviewee when we talked before the jamboree. I learned that he’s around an 8- or 9-handicap golfer who runs a family business that manages golf courses. Actually, he planned that to be his main activity in retirement from the NFL. But his friend, Steve Sabol of NFL Films, hired him in 1990, the year he quit, to work on the “NFL Matchup” show that ran on ESPN.
ESPN brought him on two years later, so Jaworski’s been in front of a microphone for nearly 20 years. To me, that’s a good thing, because I think football fans learn a ton with Jaworski breaking down the X’s and O’s.
So here’s some of what we talked about:
On his intense game-preparation: “When the ball’s kicked off at 8:35 on Monday night, that’s the best part, now I’m ready to go because I’ve prepared for everything I’m going to see. When I see formations and different things, I already know what the play’s going to be, to a certain degree. That’s kind of what I brought to Monday Night Football, more X’s and O’s but without just inundating people with too much. I try to tell people why a play worked or why it didn’t work, or the strategy involved with the game.”
On his ESPN booth-mates: “I think ESPN has done an incredible job, with Mike Tirico, myself and Tony. I’m more the football guy, Tony’s the big picture guy, he kind of has fun with me, and Mike Tirico’s as steady as it can get as far as the play-by-play guy. The chemistry is really good, we all get along great, we play golf pretty much every Sunday morning on the road.
“You know, the ratings were up significantly this year. Everybody was real happy with that. People see the three of us on TV, but we’ve got a hell of a team, it’s just like football. Everyone’s got to be in sync and in harmony. Jay Rothman, our executive producer, is just terrific at putting everybody together. A good head coach, I call him.”
On how he readies for his work: “When I come in from the Monday night game, usually around noon or 1 o’clock, I go right to my office at NFL Films and start prepping for the next Monday game. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll look at the last four games of each team. When I come in, every game is on my desk. I have a staff of four people, ex-collegiate players. I call them my coaching staff. They help me break the games down. We’ll go through a game, I’ll say ‘Give me the blitzes, give me the fronts, give me coverages, formations.’ Almost in my own mind, I game plan.”
He uses the so-called coaches tape. “Each team films the game, so every single play you see 11 guys on offense and 11 on defense. There’s a sideline shot and an end-zone shot of every play, one after the other. Each team does that and they send it to NFL Films, and that becomes the dub center.
“When Matt Millen lost his job (in Detroit), he’d come in on Wednesdays and we’d look at tape. Phil Simms, Cris Collinsworth, they’d stop in and we’d talk about it. NFL Films is the epicenter of the league Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so it’s great. It’s a great exchange of knowledge.”
On the fate of the dormant Arena League. Jaworski is president of the reigning champion Philadelphia Soul. He said there’s a one-tenth of one percent chance the league won’t return from its one-year sabbatical: “We had a board meeting in Chicago a couple weeks ago and we ratified the new collective bargaining agreement. The players association is going through it now. We have a plan in place, we’re going to open up next year again. There’s a lot at stake. I mean, ESPN is a 10-percent partner with us, we’ve got an expansion team coming in in Pittsburgh. So we left the meeting with incredible excitement.”
Shutting down “was disappointing for us, because obviously we were Arena League champions last year, our season-ticket sales were through the roof coming into this season, our partnerships were through the roof. We were all excited. But the model needed to be fixed. We were doing well, San Jose was doing well, but some teams weren’t doing very well. So the business model needed to be fixed. The only question mark is New Orleans right now. They were going to drop, but under the new business model, they’re likely to come back. But I don’t want to say definitively yet we’re gonna have New Orleans next year.”
On his notable ability to explain the game’s intricacies without overwhelming viewers: “Absolutely, I’m very, very careful about that. I’m very sensitive to it. I don’t want people clicking me off. I’ll go so far and I’ll kind of sense where I’m getting too deep. But it is amazing now -- I can say this based on the hundreds of e-mails I get during the week -- people want more. It is amazing people want more X’s and O’s. They want to know why, they just don’t want the fluff.
“I know when I got into the business, the matchup show. I mean, I was doing playbooks and X’s and O’s and it was really a teaching tool. And everyone said, ‘Oh, that’s too deep, people don’t want to know that.’ That ended up being BS. It’s amazing the kind of rating we get on Sunday morning (1.5 million viewers for NFL Matchup). Nothing gets that kind of rating that we get on Sunday morning. We have appointment viewers. People love that stuff. They want more of that stuff. And I’ve tried to make my niche that way, doing something a little more the how, the why and what to expect.”
On the discussion of an NFL rookie salary cap: “I am 100 percent for a rookie salary cap. I think it’s absolutely the worst part of the game; you’re rewarding players who have done nothing for the team that they’re eventually going to sign with, and to me you’re dissing a lot of veteran players who have given their blood sweat and tears and efforts for that team, and they don’t get rewarded because so much money goes to guys who are unproven.”
On Michael Vick’s chance to play again in the NFL: “He’ll get a shot. No. 1 he deserves another opportunity. I think he’s paid the price for his mistakes. He’s a very gifted guy. I think we saw this year, it was very prevalent around the league, the Wildcat formation, so . . .I don’t know what kind of shape Michael’s in, my suspicion is he’s in very good shape only because that’s the kind of guy he was, he took care of himself in that regard.
“He made a mistake, he’s paid the price for it, and I think he deserves an opportunity, as a quarterback. Someone will give him a shot. I hope someone gives him a shot.”
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