Sports Events and Alternate Sound

There should be a button on TV's that acts like a sports-announcer mute. All you'd get would be the the natural sound of the crowd and the game from the on-field microphones but don't get all the "witty" chatter from the announcers. I would settle, in fact, for a situation where the announcers remain muted unless they are doing an advertisement (I understand that they've got to pay the bills). So you could watch a game, hear the crowd and mute out any announcers unless they interject with a "brought to you by" or a "check out the upcoming show..."

In addition, will they ever reduce all those on-screen graphics? Less is certainly more, in my opinion. FOX puts so much clutter on the screen during the baseball and football broadcasts, I've stopped paying attention. It just makes my 13" tv seem even smaller since now there's less viewable space.

Reduce all the sound effects and glittery graphics (I'm sure the guy who made the radar gun turn to flame for any 95mph+ pitch got a promotion). Does all that clutter actually improve the ratings of the sporting event? Doubtful. If my team's games were only airing with pink graphics on Lifetime with Carrot Top doing the commentary, I'd still find a way to watch it. That extra stuff can't possibly be drawing in casual viewers.

"I was going to watch Sunday's game, but it just didn't have enough on-screen graphics so I decided to watch CSI instead."

or is it,

"Ping pong is so boring on tv. It would be so much better if it had more on-screen graphics and sound effects, like FOX NFL Sunday!"

The upcoming election will have FOX Sports-like graphics. A big bar at the top with each candidate's electoral votes. As states' results pour in, a flashing little scoreboard drops down showing percent precincts reporting and the percent for each candidate. When a projection is made, the candidate's name flashes, you hear a click and the electoral votes count goes up. Along the bottom, a ticker runs showing non-Presidential election results. Then as the pundits are busy dissecting the results, a flash at the bottom of the screen with a beeping robotic sound: Update Next.