How many sportscasters does it take to change a light bulb?

Okay, at the risk of beating a dead horse . . . I’ll share this, and then I’ll shut up about the subject for a good while. I promise. I just thought this was funny.

Every year our Sunday School class does an outing to the local Cinema Café to watch Monday Night Football on the big screen. It’s a lot of fun to get together, eat some food that is not-so-good for you, socialize, and yell for whichever team you want. But you have to get there early—the theater fills up quickly.

Well, since we got there early, I saw (off and on) about forty-five minutes of ESPN’s “Monday Night Countdown” (it runs for an hour and a half in all). I typically don’t watch Monday Night Football anymore, let alone the pre-game coverage. After a bit, what really caught my attention was that every time I looked at the big screen of the theater, there seemed to be a different group of commentators breaking down the big game for us. So I decided to count them.

First, there was the team at the ESPN studios in Connecticut. They gave us that perfect blend of technical minutiae and mindless trivia, from how Denver uses the split-nickel-blitz-zone-double-deep pass coverage, to how Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger chose his uniform number. They are:

1. Chris Berman
2. Tom Jackson
3. Mike Ditka
4. Keyshawn Johnson
5. Cris Carter (yes, he spells it “Cris”)

Then, coverage was handed off to another team, seated at a carefully constructed broadcast area somewhere on the floor of Invesco Field in Denver. I’m not sure how their purpose was any different from the guys in the studio. They are:

6. Stuart Scott
7. Matt Millen
8. Steve Young

From there, we were sent up to the broadcast booth for a few words of greeting, stage-setting, and brief analysis from the play-by-play announcers:

9. Mike Tirico
10. Ron Jaworski
11. Jon Gruden

Then it was back to the ESPN studios for more banter. Staying in the studio, Berman kicked us over to a pair of analysts. I couldn’t really tell, but it seemed they were either providing some further vital information that we all needed to know, or a human interest vignette.

12. Chris Mortensen
13. Some other guy

Then it was getting close to kick-off. So, it was only natural to check in with our beautiful sideline reporters for the game (one for each team), because, really, who wants to just look at a bunch of unattractive, hulky ex-football player dudes all night:

14. Suzy Kolber
15. Michelle Tafoya

Then finally back to the play-by-play guys for the kick-off.

That’s fifteen, count ‘em, fifteen people preparing us for a Monday Night Football game! That’s a lot more people than many of our presidents have hired to write their speeches—you know, those inconsequential orations like the State of the Union, executive orders, proclamations, and the like. That’s way more people than it took to get the first airplane to fly. That’s the same number as the seats on the United Nations Security Council.

Fifteen people are there to make sure I know that if Pittsburgh’s offense keeps driving the ball down the field and scoring like this, and if their defense keeps stopping Denver, then they stand a good chance of winning the game.