ESPN wanted to get football fans fired up for Monday Night Football between the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints. Second-year Saints quarterback Tyler Shough was an obvious player to spotlight.
There was a small problem, though. The network, which refers to itself as “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” apparently doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of one of the NFL’s leading passers.
ESPN’s main X account posted a graphic featuring Shough with the caption: “SHOUGH FLOW 🥶.”
Catchy.
Except Shough doesn’t rhyme with “flow.”
His last name is pronounced “Shuck,” as most football fans know at this point. He was, after all, the runner-up for AP Offensive Rookie of the Year last season and, to my knowledge, there’s been no pronunciation change since then.
Football fans on social media quickly started roasting ESPN over a caption built around a rhyme that doesn’t work.
“Shough doesn’t rhyme with flow and now I can’t unsee it,” one user wrote.
Another compared it to a scene from “The Office” in which Andy and Erin perform a song built around pronouncing “Sabre” as “sah-BRAY,” only to learn it’s pronounced “SAY-ber.”
Many simply wondered how ESPN could employ people who don’t know how to pronounce the names of prominent NFL players.
A reasonable question.
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To be fair, Shough has acknowledged that his last name has an odd pronunciation and he previously joked that it’s basically impossible to pronounce correctly if you haven’t heard it before.
Still, you’d hope the network broadcasting his football game might have somebody around who has.
Shough has thrown for 917 yards and eight touchdowns while completing 68.9% of his passes through three games this season. New Orleans has scored at least 24 points in every game, including 30 in the opener against Detroit and 27 last week against Las Vegas.
In other words, ESPN had plenty of material to work with without inventing a rhyme based on the wrong pronunciation of his name.
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