ESPN announced today that Dale Jarrett will replace Rusty Wallace on their race broadcast crew. DJ joins his hometown boyhood friends Andy Petree and Jerry Punch in the booth. Rusty moves on to pre-race anaylist. While the most underrated race announcer on TV, Alen Bestwick becomes pre-race host.
There is a lot of good news in this announcement. First, while not as good as his father Ned, DJ has to be a major improvement over Rusty. Hell, Alf on crack would be an improvement . Next, Bestwick is way underappreciated at ESPN. All he does is tell you what's happening on the the track. And I've saved the best for last..........apparently this means Bill Webber is going back to doing infomercials, or wherever in the hell he came from.
Happy days are here again. Too bad they could not send Crusty out to the has beens field of anouncers. Oh well I never watch the pre and post race shows on ESPN any way. Found Speed TV to do a better job in that respect.
Alan Bestwick does need more coverage. I agree he is so under rated by ESPN.
Looks like these changes by ESPN will have the fans watching the telecast again. Glad to see Bestwick have a more prominent role on race day coverage. I always enjoyed the Monday evening show Bestwick did with M. Waltrip and Schrader summarizing the previous weekends race.
Alan is the BESTwick, needs more airtime.
DJ will learn quick and be better than his dad.
Rusty will be relegated to arguing with Brad and we can just skip that part.
I know Rusty caught a lot of grief as a race announcer with ESPN. Heck, ESPN in general caught a lot of flack for their coverage. In Rusty's defense, he was a rookie annonucer and ESPN was new to the NASCAR game. Hopefully these changes will be for the better. Nice write up.
countryjag
And still the coverage will on the face of it appear amateurish. Thanks in no large part to ESPN. What was once a highly watchable product on NBA, TNT and Fox has been relegated into something almost unrecognizable. They may well be a worldwide leader in sports programming but when it comes to NASCAR they're at best akin to a bunch of play it by ear wannabe's.
Fish...Rusty actually was on espn's IRL broadcasts the year before last. Loved hearing Scott Goodyear correct him over and over.
top...you said it bruddah. The 4 letter network thinks they can take a director who has done nothing except stick and ball sports and turn him loose at a NASCAR track.
counttyjag
Thankfully they're not the ones covering NASCAR and in particular the Daytona 500. 'cause if they were I doubt that I'd end up watching any of the race. But come to think of it if they were. I'd probably end up just using the mute button on my tv and listen to the commentary on the radio.
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