Greg Gumbel was on the call for the Pittsburgh Steelers-Carolina Panthers game Sunday afternoon. And the 76-year-old play-by-play announcer had a really hard time telling the teams’ quarterbacks apart.
During the second half of the game, social media started buzzing about Gumbel repeatedly referring to Steelers’ quarterback Mitch Trubisky as Sam Darnold, who is currently the Panthers’ starting quarterback. We found three instances during Pittsburgh’s first drive of the second half where Gumbel called Trubisky “Darnold” without being corrected.
Here's a compilation of Greg Gumbel repeatedly referring to Mitch Trubisky as Sam Darnold on one drive pic.twitter.com/zBW35LchLP
— Brandon Contes (@BrandonContes) December 19, 2022
It’s entirely possible that the mistake occurred more than three times, but we didn’t skim through the entire game.
In Gumbel’s defense, Trubisky and Darnold have a lot of similarities. Both had teams trade up in the draft to select them, both were top-three picks, both were labeled “franchise quarterbacks,” both are now long gone from those teams, and both are pretty bad starting quarterbacks.
The differences, however, remained jarring Sunday afternoon, with Trubisky on the field wearing a white Steelers jersey that read “Trubisky” across the back, and Darnold wearing a black Panthers jersey with the name “Darnold” on his back.
Confusing Trubisky and Darnold once wouldn’t be a big deal. Even twice isn’t worthy of writing about it. But three times in the span of five minutes on one drive? That’s a pretty rough blunder for an announcer as accomplished as Gumbel.
And while Gumbel deserves most of the blame, he received no help from analyst Adam Archuleta, who surely could have stepped in to correct his broadcast partner at least once while viewers were home yelling at the TV.
[CBS]
