The ESPN Monday Night Football crew were all on conference call today to preview the 2014 NFL season. As you would expect the Washington team name controversy came up. All three weighed in on how they will approach using the team name.
Here is the response from Lisa Salters:
“My opinion is pretty simple. I never want to offend anyone with my actions or my words. So if I offend one person with the use of the nickname, I’d rather not use it. So for me it’s a pretty simple solution because I’m not talking constantly throughout the game like Mike and Jon.
“So for me in our preseason game I chose to in our pregame coverage, which lasted for a few hours, I chose to just say Washington. That’s just how I dealt with it, and it was pretty simple, pretty subtle. No one noticed, no one said anything. So that’s just how I handle it.”
Lisa Salters has a standard and practice similar to Greg Gumbel; just wove the name out seamlessly, and we didn’t notice, as Gumbel revealed to me here.
Paul M. Banks owns and operates The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports, Yahoo! and Chicago Tribune RedEye. He’s been a guest on news talk shows all across the world and been featured in hundreds of media outlets including NFL Network, Fox Sports 1 and ESPN2. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)