Everyone's Favorite Bafflingly Wrong Person Is Officially Out As The Officiating Expert On CBS

Newsday- CBS has not replaced Mike Carey as its NFL officiating analyst for the coming season and has no current plans to, but if the right person comes along, the network might someday revisit the idea.

“We have not found anybody for that job right now,” CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said Tuesday during CBS’ annual NFL media lunch. “We’re not actively looking, but if we found somebody we would reinstitute that role.”

“It takes some people a while to develop into good broadcasters, and the viewing public was not as patient as I thought they might be,” McManus said of Carey’s relatively brief term on TV.

“The issue that I didn’t anticipate was the reaction he would get when he disagreed with the official,” McManus said. 

“For some reason it’s OK for Jim Nantz or Joe Buck or Cris Collinsworth or Jon Gruden to disagree with an official, but when Mike disagreed, with all the years of experience he had, he used to get criticized, pretty roundly. So I think that surprised me. It is a difficult role, and if your job is to predict what the official is going to say, that’s an easier job than actually stating your opinion, which might be different.”



What?! Am I late to this party? Am I the last to find out that I don't get to laugh at and ruthlessly mock Mike Carey this season?! I swear, the NFL really is popular despite itself. Even the networks that carry it's games don't understand what it's viewers enjoy. They have no idea how much pleasure people derived from playfully cursing Mike Carey's existence.

Sure, everyone with a Twitter account - at one point or another - criticized him for the legitimately unbelievable percentage of calls he got wrong, but that doesn't mean he wasn't an invaluable part of the broadcast. The rate in which he was incorrect was actually more impressive than the vast majority of plays he was paid to analyze. People talk about how unsustainable Brady and Brees continued success is, but the most extraordinary, seemingly implausible performance in the National Football League has been the incompetence of Mike Carey. He truthfully could not possibly have been maintained such a high level of inaccuracy if he was actively trying to be inaccurate, and there was something so endearing about witnessing that unmatchable amount of futility - when it was so obviously unintentional - in real time.

I don't want to speak for everyone, but I am going to miss Mike Carey. He was everyone's friend that tries way too hard to play Devil's Advocate, but it wasn't even an act. It was just the purest of professional ineptitude. I'm not even being a little sarcastic when I say that finding out he will be absent this year has me a little disappointed. Still can't wait for football season, but damn - not having America's favorite punching bag floating around is going to sting a bit.