In referring to Hoya's blog about sports commentators, I started to wonder myself if we even needed commentators at all. I personally would prefer a different form of viewing professional sports. For example, the NFL network has a show called, Mic'd Up where they show the game play by play but show the audience what both the players and coaches are saying on the sideline, even showing the inappropriate language. Most of the time commentators do not have anything to say and end up either talking about a topic either completely unrelated or something so obvious that does not needed to be said. A great example of this is John Madden. Either he is the dumbest man alive or is completely wrong for the job yet he is one of the most popular commentators around.
Just having the visual of the game without any noise would probably be annoying so maybe they should just have the commentators have a play-by-play and just talk about statistics...that is it. They don't need to talk about anything else, their not getting paid to talk about the hot dog vendor or how the new stadium looks. You could even have music playing when there is nothing to talk about for all I care. Personally, I would love to have every show like Mic'd Up but I don't think that would ever happen in our lifetime. Network television is way too conservative, at least in America. I feel I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by this so maybe things can change over time. Only time will tell.