As a sports fan, it is hardwired into me to love ESPN. I don’t see how anyone could dislike the network. It is by far the best nationwide sports network there is, and its website is probably the best online resource for sports information as well.

Yet, as I was watching the Celtics-Magic game on Tuesday night, I found myself welling up with hatred at the idiotic “commentators” that continued to drone on senselessly at critical junctures in the game. Jeff Van Gundy, Mark Jackson and Mike Breen refused to simply allow me to watch — they felt a need to constantly comment every time the ball moved.

In fact, this is a problem endemic throughout the world of sports media. The former players and coaches hired to sit in booths and talk into microphones don’t seem to understand that the game itself, not their commentary, is the center of the sports fan’s experience.

To all you so-called commentators: I’m not an idiot. When a free throw doesn’t go into the basket, I know that the shooter missed the free throw (I cannot tell you how many times Breen felt compelled to inform me of this fact after I had seen it happen not five seconds earlier). When a hitter swings at a pitch and misses, I don’t need to be told that it’s a swing and a miss. When I see a quarterback throw a bomb down the middle of the field, it’s pretty obvious that it’s “a deep pass down the middle of the field.”

The reason these people are given microphones in the first place is because they’re supposed to have some kind of knowledge or expertise that I don’t. Having them simply repeat what happened on screen is an insult to sports fans everywhere.

That being said, the commentators do have a purpose for me, which they did manage to fulfill to an extent during the Celtics-Magic game. Their job is to tell me things that are relevant to the game, but that I would not have known on my own. For example, it was helpful when they updated me on the fact that Dwight Howard was close to fouling out and that Glen Davis was a terrible free-throw shooter during the season. There were also times when they broke down and analyzed the strategies of each team.

The real problem is that broadcasting still seems to be stuck in the radio era, where it has its roots. For radio listeners, the voice of the reporter was the only medium through which the sports fan experienced the game. Broadcasting entailed repeating all the details of the action and frequently repeating the time remaining and the current score (which are communicated on television by scoreboard banners on the periphery of the screen).

Today’s commentators have not been able to move too far beyond this style. Some more embellishment has supplanted straight factual broadcasting, but the underlying idea of the sports broadcaster as a person who communicates the ebb and flow of the game to viewers has not changed. The move from the radio style to a new focus, one that acknowledges that the viewer is both watching and knowledgeable, is essential to rid sports media of the clutter that plagues it today.

There is always the possibility of the opposite excess, too — commentators engaging in pseudo-analysis or opining on irrelevant subjects while the damn game is happening. Enough of modern sports is commercials, replays and people standing around to begin with; why do ESPN’s hacks feel the need to rob me of my precious, precious live action?

The worst offenders are the commentators on ESPN’s atrocious Monday Night Football, who seem to think that they (not the game) are the entertainment that the viewer tunes in for. I cannot tell you how many stupid “in-booth interviews” I have sat through, silently praying that the network would end it and actually go back to its primary responsibility of, you know, showing me the game in progress.

Despite all of this, the best option is probably to just wait for the interactive TVs that I’ve heard are coming soon. They allow you to customize your viewing experience, from camera angles to sound. I’ll finally be able to decide how I want to watch my sports, which will most certainly include shutting off the inane babbling of an ESPN talking head.

Kabir Sawhney doesn’t seem to realize that radio broadcasts still exist. Remind him that he is a sports broadcaster himself at ksawhney “at” stanford.edu.