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Thanks to all of you that voted and participated in the First Round of the Joe Morgan Memorial Tournament.  If you’re new to the party, the JMMT is in search of putting a new face on Awful Announcing’s Mount Rushmore.  The field began with a diverse array of sports media personalities including national and local, play by play and analysts, studio hosts and radio hosts, and everything in-between.  Some “lucky” current sports media personality will be the newest person to be memorialized on the Mount Rushmore of Awful Announcing.  Throughout the last week, the field has been cut in half from 32 hopefuls down to 16.  Here’s the full results from Round 1…

1) Skip Bayless d. Woody Paige  77.91% – 22.09%
2) Rick Reilly d. Hawk Harrelson  58.7% – 41.3%
3) Tony Siragusa d. Jack Edwards 71.55% – 28.45%
4) Thom Brennaman d. Jon Gruden 58.32% – 41.68%
5) Deion Sanders d. Mike Tirico 69.59% – 30.41%
6) Michael Irvin d. Dick Stockton  71.61% – 28.39%
7) Chris Berman d. Erik Kuselias  76.83% – 23.17%
8) Pierre McGuire d. Reggie Miller  57.62% – 42.38%
9) Craig James d. Mike Patrick  75.17% – 24.83%
10) Joe Theismann d. Mike & Mike  65.70% – 34.30%
11) Mark May d. Dave Lapham 65.07% – 34.93%
12) Jim Gray d. Jim Nantz  78.15% – 21.85%
13) Stephen A. Smith d. Stuart Scott  51.45% – 48.55%
14) John Sterling d. Matt Millen  58.69% – 41.31%
15) Joe Buck d. Chris Rose  72.53% – 27.47%
16) Colin Cowherd d. Bobby Valentine  88.47% – 11.53%

A few notes from the first round before we reveal the second round draw…

*Matt Millen won our 2010 Worst Announcer of the Year reader poll at Awful Announcing at the end of the last year by a wide margin.  However, he lost out to Yankees play by play man John Sterling in what I consider to be the upset of the first round.  Yes it is baseball season, and yes, Sterling has had some epic botches recently, but still the result is surprising with just how critical fans have been of Matt Millen.  The force of the Evil Empire is certainly strong.

*It should be no surprise that Colin Cowherd received the highest percentage of first round winners by a wide margin.  He was the only person to receive over 80% of the vote… after all, over 80% of voters said that Cowherd should be fired in an AA poll last month.  Jim Gray and Skip Bayless received the next highest percentages.  The closest first round matchup saw Stephen A. Smith narrowly defeat fellow ESPN NBA personality Stuart Scott.

*The most interesting first round matchup may have been Pierre McGuire’s comeback victory over Reggie Miller.  Reggie had built up an early lead, but then the online hockey community got involved and pushed Pierre to the top.  How far will their passion against McGuire carry the bald headed analyst?

*Here’s the network breakdown for the remaining 16 competitors…

8 ESPN, 3 Fox, 3 NFLN, 1 NBC, 1 local announcer

Now, without waiting any longer, we’ll reveal the draw for the Second Round matchups.  As a reminder, we’re randomly redrawing brackets every round until the semifinals to add a little more unpredictability and remove any bias due to seeding.  We drew the top 8 votegetters from Round 1 against the Bottom 8.  Here are your second round matchups with the dates of each.  We’ll run two matchups a day again in this round and be back on Monday with the 2nd Round recap and Quarterfinal draw.  Links to the polls are here as well and winners are in bold.

Thursday – John Sterling v Skip Bayless 
Thursday – Joe Buck v Deion Sanders  
Friday – Chris Berman vs Mark May  
Friday – Colin Cowherd v Joe Theismann  
Saturday – Jim Gray vs Thom Brennaman
Saturday – Craig James vs Rick Reilly
Sunday – Michael Irvin vs Pierre McGuire
Sunday – Tony Siragusa v Stephen A Smith
 

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