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Gruden to replace Kornheiser on MNF

Your new Monday Night Football team! (Photo: KissingSuzyKolber)

ESPN announced today that former Bucs and Raiders head coach Jon Gruden will replace Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football.  Gruden will join Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski in the booth, and hope to have a longer tenure than previous failed color commentators Dennis Miller, Joe Theisman, and most recently, Kornheiser.  And even though Gruden has relatively little experience on camera, it would be hard to do worse than his predecessor.

From the beginning, the Kornheiser experiment seemed doomed to fail.  on Pardon the Interruption, he brings incisive, cutting analysis to a wide variety of sports.  On MNF, he was just another braying talking head, blathering on about almost anything except what was actually happening on the field in front of him.

So Kornheiser decided to step down from MNF, although he will still continue on PTI.  But the reason TK won’t be calling games anymore might come as a surprise to you:  it was because of his fear of flying!

I am totally grateful for the MNF opportunity that I truly enjoyed the last three seasons,” he said. “I feel we got better each year. My fear of planes is legendary and sadly true. When I looked at the upcoming schedule it was the perfect storm that would’ve frequently moved me from the bus to the air. I kept looking at the schedule the past month and wanted to find a way to quietly extricate myself.

So yeah, it had nothing to do with the fact that Kornheiser sucked ass.  Even though John Madden made a career out of calling games and criss-crossing the country on the Madden Cruiser bus, Kornheiser simply couldn’t sack up and make it happen (or better yet, pop a Xanax and get on the friggin plane!).  Yup, that makes perfect sense.