By Bill Spain

ABC announces "What's Her Name" replaced as Monday Night Football “side-line” reporter.

ABC announced today that it was once again revamping its mix of announcers for its Monday Night Football broadcast. While retaining the broadcast team of Al Michaels and John Madden in the booth, it announced that it is introducing a revolutionary "open mike" system for sideline interviews.

"Based on our ratings for the year, and celebrity recognition polls that were done in conjunction with CNN and People Magazine, we determined that there was no value being provided at all by having... um..." stated Fred Gaudelli, Monday Night Football's producer, at a press conference yesterday, while seemingly gazing around the press room for assistance in recalling the name of the current side line reporter, Lisa Guerro, "a reporter down on the field."

In an exclusive interview with The Becker Sports Report, Gaudelli admitted, "At first, we thought it was just, uh, what's her name, but then we looked at other networks and saw the value provided by people like [Fox side line reporter and former Baltimore Raven] Tony Siragusa and realized that it wasn't just us that were suffering through this situation. That's when we decided to break broadcasting ground and try the open mike concept."

ABC reports that it will place two microphones on the field, accompanied by cameras – one on each sideline, which will be available for players to walk up to and offer spontaneous comments and anecdotes whenever they please. ABC will edit the comments in near real time and replay comments they deem interesting.

"We realized that .0001% of our viewers actually cared to hear about the human interest stories sideline reporters tell or the statistical trends that they comment on that John or Al could recite just as easily. We figured we could do no worse with unsolicited random comments and stories by the players and coaches on the field."

ABC did state however, that coaches will still be required to provide a two sentence statement about their team's performance while walking either to or from the locker room during the half time break. "We were required to provide the coaches with camera time based on our broadcast contract with the NFL. But with the puff cake questions we were asking them, we figured we might as well just let them make any comment they chose, since they usually ignored our questions and said what they wanted to anyway."

Prior to having Lisa Guerro as the side line reporter, ABC featured former NFL player Erik Dickerson as its side line reporter for two years. While reportedly no one could understand anything that Erik Dickerson said, ABC's research showed that when Lisa Guerro made reports, the audience would go into a trance, unable to recall a word she had said. Hundreds of thousands of viewers in the Eastern time zone apparently would fail to come out of the trance and would fall fast asleep, only to wake the next morning upset that they had missed the entire second half of action.

“Frankly, some nights we forgot she was there,” admitted MNF broadcaster Al Michaels. “One of the assistants in the booth would have to remind us before half time rolled around that we hadn’t gone down to her yet.”

“You know what though,” chuckled Michaels, “between you and me, some nights I knew she was there, and was trying to seen how far into the game we could go before she had something useful to say.”

Bill Spain makes his second appearance in The Becker Sports Report. Bill was ranked among the Top 50 bachelors in the world until he married; he is presently ranked in the Top 50 men under six feet.