The Twitter crowd will have to find someone else to make fun of on NFL Sundays, because it won’t have Mike Carey to skewer anymore.
Bob Raismann of the New York Daily News reported on Saturday that CBS would not be brining back Carey, its in-studio rules analyst, for the 2016 season after two less-than-stellar years. The Big Lead has a network spokesperson confirming the news, saying CBS and Carey have “mutually agreed to part ways.”
CBS hired Carey in 2014, after he retired from a 23-year career as an NFL official, to give it a rules analyst to compete with Fox Sports, which had hired former official and NFL vice president Mike Pereira in 2010.
But where Pereira has been a fantastic hire for Fox, Carey was the opposite for CBS. He was frequently wrong when asked to predict what the verdict would be on challenged plays, and he was also stiff on camera.
It was not a good combination.
USA Today ran down some of Carey’s frequent flubs and problems last November, and during the broadcast of Super Bowl 50, Carey was brought in just once, when Carolina Panthers coach Ron Rivera challenged a call of an incomplete pass. After saying it was a good challenge by the Panthers and that based on replays he would reverse the call, game referee Clete Blakeman announced the call of a non-catch would be upheld.
It was Carey’s television tenure in a nutshell.
And his mistakes have not been forgotten: just this week, after the NFL’s Twitter feed was hacked to announce that commissioner Roger Goodell had died, Yahoo’s Andy Behrens tweeted this:
As an official, Carey was well-respected, and was the first African-American to be named referee of a Super Bowl. He was referee of Super Bowl XLII between the New England Patriots and New York Giants.
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