Off-topic: Somebody Burped During the Giants-Redskins Game

This is way off topic for this blog, but I don’t have anywhere else to write stuff like this…

I was mindlessly watching the Giants-Redskins game last night (which actually was one of the better games of the season), when my wife, paying even less attention than I was, suddenly exclaimed, “Did Bryant Gumbel just burp on the air?” Thanks to the magic of TiVo, I quickly verified that somebody let out a loud belch at the 3:04 mark of the 3rd quarter. It happened during dead air, making it seem like either NFL Network play-by-play man Bryant Gubmel or color commentator Cris Collinsworth was to blame. I found a YouTube clip of the first incident:

It happened again at roughly 13:28 of the 4th quarter, this time while they were talking. With about 6 minutes left in the game, Gumbel addressed the issue, saying that threre was an “open mic” somewhere, and that he and Collinsworth were not, in fact, battling “indigestion.”

I have no idea who did the burping. Honestly, I doubt it was one of the booth guys, because I have to believe they’d turn off their mics to burp, cough, sneeze, or anything else, and failing that, at least follow it up with an “excuse me” or something. They’re professionals—it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve been on TV. But I also wonder why the “open mic” didn’t seem to catch a lot of other random sounds… just a couple loud belches.

A quick search reveals that a couple other blogs have weighed in on this topic as well.