Generally it’s not a good idea to get too political on a sports broadcast. Sames goes for religion. It rarely ends well for those involved.
Not only did NBC “Sunday Night Football” host Bob Costas get political about gun control last night, he went above and beyond in a dedicated editorial on the subject in the wake of Jovan Belcher’s murder-suicide.
Belcher was the Chiefs linebacker who shot and killed his girlfriend before committing suicide in the Arrowhead Stadium parking lot on Saturday. There’s no question it deserved discussion on the broadcast, but Costas ticked off a lot of people with his sermon. CBS’s pregame show inexplicably ignored the Belcher shooting for the first five minutes of their show.
Fox News (and Fox Business) was just one of many outlets that criticized Costas this morning.
Ironically, he took most of the speech from columnist Jason Whitlock’s Sunday column, so they weren’t even his own words.
Costas is certainly welcome to have an opinion on gun control, but is halftime of a football game the right place to insert it?
No sermonizing on the topic from me, let’s just think of Belcher and Kasandra Perkins’s 3-month-old daughter.
Follow Metro New York Sports Editor Mark Osborne on Twitter @MetroNYSports.
