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Limbaugh thrives as NFL outsider on ESPN broadcast

If Rush Limbaugh talking football on ESPN's "Sunday NFL Countdown" seems the equivalent of Bill O'Reilly jumping bare out of Al Franken's birthday cake, think again.

Tanned and trim (had he been to training camp?), Limbaugh brings a tart, arrogant outsider's viewpoint to a studio program designed for core pigskin fans and which, in past years, added the insiders Marty Schottenheimer and Bill Parcells.

But those guys are coaching again and Limbaugh is creating a kind of functional discord from his perch 20 feet to the side of the main set, needling his playmates as if they were callers to his radio show. His chief role is to throw red Rush Challenge flags to opinions expressed by Tom Jackson, Steve Young and Michael Irvin, although he also offers a weekly essay. Think of George Will with such power!

"We never know what Rush is going to say," Jackson said Monday in a telephone interview. "We're not even aware that he's getting ready."

Each time he offered one of his challenges (which he gets more of in two hours than coaches can use in a full game), he provoked a tizzy of back talk as all three of the former star players responded to Rush and to each other. They were a couple of cross-dressing defensive tackles away from Springerville.

We learned from Limbaugh that he is unsentimental (he coolly said New England players are professionals and should adjust to the release of Lawyer Milloy, while his pals argued for what he meant as a person to other Patriots) no friend of the sports media (so obsequious to Parcells that it would not criticize him even if he went 0-16 for three years at Dallas) or of Jeremy Shockey (rejecting Young's belief that "he may be outsmarting us all" with his dumb behavior).

In their argument over Parcells, Limbaugh tweaked Jackson, a former Denver linebacker, over how many games he thought Parcells would win ("He takes the field? He's going to win five or six games?") and excoriated Young for believing that failing in Dallas would tarnish the former Giants' coach's reputation.

"He's a professional debater," Jackson said.

"He's very good at it. He obviously has a passion for his position, and once you realize that, you'd better have a passion for whatever you're arguing."

Jackson said he hopes for more Rush Challenges; perhaps, he said, he can get a few more if earlier challenges succeed. But not many more. "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" died from overexposure by ABC.

What Limbaugh offers in tough love he may lack in deep football know-how.

While posing, in a way, as the most articulate sports-talk radio caller in history, Limbaugh does not know what a player like Milloy means to a team (witness his performance for Buffalo in shutting out New England, 31-0) and is unaware of how much the New York sports media has criticized Parcells in the past.

In his debut last Thursday before the Jets-Redskins season opener, Limbaugh argued that some of the greatness of the NFL can be found in more fans attending preseason games than those at all the games involving baseball's postseason hopefuls last September.

Well, here's Sandomir's Challenge for Rush: NFL teams tie season-ticket sales to the purchase of preseason tickets and football stadiums can be twice as large as ballparks.

Based on early appearances, the Limbaugh hiring was by far the most significant and successful change to the NFL studio programs.
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