Korhnheiser makes MNF execs wistful for halcyon days of Dennis Miller

CHICAGO, IL — As yet another season’s worth of Monday Night Football featuring Tony Kornheiser draws to a close, the higher-ups who handle the ESPN’s sole pro football property are once again lamenting the short-sighted dismissal of the great Dennis Miller after the 2001-02 season.

“It’s not like we don’t value Tony’s contributions to the broadcast,” said one MNF executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But in a lot of ways, isn’t he just a poor man’s Dennis Miller? I mean, he’s like Dennis Miller only less funny and without the disturbing conservative agenda.”

The executive went on to point out that when Kornheiser was initially hired, it was hoped that he would be a better version of Miller, but that two full seasons have shown him to be equally uninformed about the game of football and simply not as clever.

“I’m not going to weigh in on either side of this debate, really,” even-keeled play-by-play man Mike Tirico said of his heavily Long Island-accented boothmate. “I can tell you that there are some places where he obviously helps us out. For instance, there’s no way we would have hit our quota of Brett Favre mentions during last night’s game without Tony bringing him up all the time.”

In addition to referencing Favre with alarming frequency, Kornheiser has been criticized for stepping on useful football analysis from co-analyst Ron Jaworski with bizarre, unnecessary and often overly high-brow comic relief.

“In retrospect we probably should have thought this through and just gone right back to Dennis Miller when Madden left,” laments ESPN head honcho George Bodenheimer. “We knew the three-man booth was pure genius, and we figured Tony would be good as the entertainer component of the booth because he’s so funny on PTI and as a sportswriter we figured he’d know more about football than Dennis Miller. Clearly we were wrong, but at this point we’re locked in.

“Although, now that I think about it, maybe Dennis would be a good fit for PTI.”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!