I don’t think I can take another season of Dick Vitale calling the premier college basketball games. Tonight, his inane incessant chatter about everything but the Duke-Marquette game drove me to mute the volume on my TV.

      Okay, I’ll start by saying that I respect the enthusiasm he has brought to college basketball. I almost respect his knowledge of the game and his development of his own style. But he does three things that make him unbearable.

      1. He spends way too much time talking about matters other than the game – other sports, long time friends of his that nobody has heard of, other games, other players.

      2. He devotes a significant portion of each game gushing over the coaches and the star players of each time. Since I’ve never ever heard him say that a coach was a “bad coach” or that a team's performance was the result of bad coaching, the incessant praise for the coach is meaningless.

       3. Finally, he just talks too damn much. Way too much repetition of the same point over and over again. He seems to think that people tune in to hear his opinions on everything. Never, never, never does he allow a moment of silence. The second the play-by-play guy concludes this sentence, Vitale is off to the races.

    Yet, for all this, he is ESPN’s signature color man and the ESPN producers make no effort to rein him in. So he must have his audience. I just can’t figure out who it is.