Congratulations to ESPN football commentator Craig James, who beat Fox droll-monger Joe Buck in the finals of Awful Announcing’s 32-person tournament to determine who would replace former Sunday Night Baseball commentator Joe Morgan on AA’s four-person Mount Rushmore. James joins Pam Ward, Dick Vitale and Tim McCarver on the facade.
James defeated his broadcast partner Mike Patrick in Round 1 and was never tested along the way, also beating out some of the biggest names in AA lore – Rick Reilly, Stephen A. Smith, Chris Berman, and Joe Buck. His victories over Berman and Buck were astoundingly ginormous. 77% of the vote against Berman and 85% of the vote against Buck (over 21,000 votes in the Final were cast for Craig James).
Is James an “awful” announcer? That’s debatable. Frankly I’ve never found anything he’s said to be particularly insightful or inflammable; but he’s a former college football star from Texas, who happens to be telegenic, so he gets a lot of airtime on the World Wide Leader. Is he an “awful” human being? That assessment might have more traction, at least when you consider Awful Announcing’s take on why James was so unpopular among voters in the site’s tournament.
In case you’ve been in the Alaskan wilderness the last two years, James’ son Adam was at the center of a scandal that resulted in Mike Leach being fired from Texas Tech. Since, Leach has been on a crusade against Tech, Craig James, and ESPN in what appeared to be a “he said, she said” kind of roundabout argument.
But when excerpts from Leach’s new book, Swing Your Sword, were introduced it was a gamechanger. Now, we had visible proof through e-mails between James and his hired trolls at Spaeth Communications that the PR campaign against Leach was largely bogus. Spaeth and James conspired to falsely vilify Leach, forward lies from Adam James as truth, pollute blogs with fake comments, and feed fabrications to ESPN “reporters,” all the while grinding a personal axe against Leach for not treating Adam James with the regality that he deserved. Simply, Craig James took part in a false character assassination using his position in the college football media and on the “leader” to do nothing more than carry out his petty, childish, pathetic personal agenda.