Bryant Gumbel in 1980: I'm Not a Whiz at Play-by-Play ... I Don't Like My Voice - FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

There were two basic complaints about Bryant Gumbel, the recently departed play-by-play voice at NFL Network, and both of them are addressed in this post at the New York Times' Fifth Down blog. The first is that he made too many verbal gaffes, like the infamous time that he called Tony Romo "Rick Romo":

The second was that his voice wasn't right for the job of being a play-by-play announcer. And it turns out that in a 1980 Sports Illustrated article, Gumbel acknowledged just that:

"I'm not a whiz at play-by-play announcing," says Bryant Gumbel. "I don't like the sound of my voice. And I was never a professional athlete. My ability is to digest a lot of information, which I dispense calmly and articulately while everyone around me is going bananas."

Gumbel pretty much nails what his harshest critics say when he says he's not a whiz at play-by-play and doesn't hve a good voice for it. But overall, I think Gumbel got a little bit of a bad rap because he didn't get enough credit for the way he interacted with his color commentators on NFL Network: You could always tell Gumbel's background was as an interviewer because he set up the ex-players in the booth with penetrating questions.

The Gumbel era will be remembered as a failure, as eventually the voice and the mistakes became too much to overcome. I'm not sorry to see him go, but I also think he got more criticism than he deserved.