A sanctuary for sports fans: Muting just the announcers

So I'm sitting at a bar in San Francisco watching the Dallas Cowboys beat the Green Bay Packers last week on NFL Network when I noticed that during the second half, the bar stopped playing the sound from the game and instead blasted some blues music through the speakers.

I thought perhaps I was in a "Packers" bar because, frankly, it's no fun to listen to the announcers when your team is losing. I asked the bartender the reason for the change and he replied it was because of how annoying Cris Collinsworth and Bryant Gumbel were to listen to for a whole game. He then suggested a great Missing Feature that I had forgotten I have really wanted for a long time: Natural sound from the stadium with no announcers as an option for listening. Much like the SAP button that provides Spanish language broadcasts, this would be an option for fans to turn on and off as they please.

There are many benefits to such functionality:

-- Fans who are forced to watch *their* team play on *another* team's broadcast could spare themselves the blatant homerism that can make many regional sporting broadcasts unwatchable.

-- Networks could use it as a means of grading the quality of announcers with concrete numbers instead of hunches and surveys.

-- Networks could still rake in the considerable revenue from advertising they currently pull in, and might even be able to trumpet a more effective advertising environment if the only announcers voices the audience hears are ones selling their products.

This technology certainly seems achievable. One glance at the offerings provided by DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket, U.S. Open tennis coverage or its NASCAR package -- where the user controls what games, courts or drivers they want to follow -- illustrates the technical strides sports broadcasting has made in just the past few years.

Hopefully someone will listen to this so that we don't have to listen to people we don't want to.