"I wanted some Olympics, and having no cable, I searched the interweb until I came upon the official NBC website for the olympics...I was able to get a video of the entire US vs. Spain men's Basketball game. Sans commentary. Seriously. All you can hear are squeaks of sneakers, gasps from the audience, foul protesting in Spanish, and serious cuss words from Team Redeemable.
(...)
the best part of watching was the ability to hear how serious these guys are taking it. They scream out defensive assignments and yell at each other to let the ticky-tack foul calls go. My favorite moment was between Kobe and Melo, and no it didn't involve a discussion of the Zagat guide ratings for hotels in Colorado. After Dwight Howard customarily missed the first of two free throws and the ball landed in the hands of a hapless amigo, Melo chided Kobe for not boxing out. Kobe cursed back at Melo and bet him that he will get the next miss before Melo. Which led to Kobe skying for a rebound on a made free throw and somehow all of this made me feel proud to be an American."

This sounds heavenly, and I've been recommending for the past few years that someone at the major sports conferences, or a network, cable provider, someone somewhere, should invest in dual-audio channels for sports games, like on a DVD or something. It doesn't seem technologically too hard, and the ambience of well-mic'd playcalling and trash-talking, as James mentions above, can be endlessly more entertaining than hack play-by-play guys and ex-jock commentators. King Kaufman wrote a bit about this happening in Canada a few years ago, pessimistic about the chance of us ever losing the booth chatter. But what if there were just an option for us to lose the play-by-play?:

"As much as we all love to talk about who should be the announcer for this or that broadcast and how good or bad various announcers are, I've long maintained that announcers don't mean much to fans.

We're used to having them there, so not having them is something that would take some getting used to. A game with stadium or arena noise and no announcers just sounds kind of awkward to ears trained to either listen to or selectively tune out the omnipresent chatter that's accompanied action since the medium was new.

And make no mistake: We'll never have the chance to get used to such a thing. Announcers aren't there to provide insight and analysis or to identify players and describe action. They're required to do all those things, and we judge them on how well they do them.

But their primary purpose is to read promos. The networks and sponsors aren't giving that up. We're stuck with announcers for as long as we're stuck with money."