As if Booger McFarland’s job in the Booger Mobile wasn’t going to be hard enough, he was tasked with the added challenge of being compared to Charles Barkley.
ESPN did McFarland a disservice when they put him in the Booger Mobile instead of alongside Joe Tessitore and Jason Witten in the booth for their Monday Night Football broadcast in 2018. And then-MNF producer Jay Rothman similarly didn’t do McFarland any favors when he dubbed the new game analyst “football’s Charles Barkley.”
This week, McFarland was The Main Event on Andrew Marchand’s sports media podcast. During the interview, the ESPN analyst was asked about the pressure of being compared to Barkley. Despite the seemingly unfair expectation, McFarland says he didn’t pay much attention to it.
“It’s a high bar, and there are expectations that probably come with it, but Charles and I did two different jobs,” McFarland said. “Charles has been a hall-of-fame studio analyst. And being a studio analyst and a game analyst are two different things. So I think what he meant – and I never asked him about it because it didn’t matter to me – but I think what he meant was, ‘Here’s a guy who calls it like he sees it, who says what’s on his mind.’
“That’s what Charles does. And that’s what I pretty much do. You can’t do it the same on the broadcast when you have to talk in 10 to 15-second increments, as you can in a studio when you guys got a 10-minute segment. It’s totally different. I understand how people could say, ‘Man, that’s a high bar.’ But it’s two different jobs. Perception vs reality. Perception is, ‘That’s an unfair comparison.’ And the reality is, you really can’t compare us, other than personality-wise. But from a job standpoint, we’re doing two different jobs.”
While promoting their new Monday Night Football booth in 2018, Rothman also called Tessitore a “cross between Frank Sinatra and Brent Musburger” and described Witten as “Captain America.” So, while the Barkley comparison may have been a high bar, it was probably more attainable than the comparisons given to his broadcast partners.
The biggest problem with comparing McFarland to Barkley was that he was being tasked with a role that had never been done before. No one knew how the Booger Mobile would fit on the broadcast. McFarland’s personality might have Barkley’s potential, but it was really hard to stick him in a mobile high chair moving at 30 mph and tell him, ‘Go sound like the best studio analyst in sports.’
But that’s what networks do. They don’t temper expectations; they explode them. It’s almost like Fox paying and hyping a quarterback (who never thought about being an analyst before) like he’s one of the best broadcasters ever and then having to sit through the slander when he doesn’t meet those expectations.
