Besides Mike Tirico hesitatingly stating the obvious: "I'm almost willing to say this is the best drive the Saints have had all year" when they scored their first touchdown (The only TD they scored against the Colts was of the defensive variety, and against the Bucs it was in garbage time) among his many other inane observations, ESPN's coverage was poor across the board. They broke into the game twice to tell us that train-wreck Mike Tyson had been sentenced for drug possession - (is that really newsworthy enough to tell us, or is it just that your opinion of your audience is so low that you assume our appetite for that sort of thing is insatiable) - to their shilling for FEMA (of course the reconstruction is taking a long time, nothing of this scale has been done before), to their beating the Katrina thing to death to tell us how much ESPN cares. Look, just because it's never been done before doesn't mean you're doing a good job, either. Maybe there's nothing to compare it to, AND you're still dragging your feet. Why is Suzy Kolber suddenly making FEMA's case? And if ESPN cares, then they should help out quietly, not try to tell me, the viewer, 20 times how much they care. I don't care how much you care. And the more you tell me, the more I suspect you don't care at all and are merely exploiting the venue for cynical self-promotion.

Between how poorly the Saints played, to the billion stoppages of play, to the horrible coverage, I found myself switching to Weeds and Californication for most of the game. Not literally, unfortunately, but the shows.