In conjunction with the arrival of Dan Patrick to NBC, former ESPN partner Keith Olbermann cracked wise regarding Patrick’s presence on Football Night in America, the one-hour-plus highlights show that precedes the Sunday night game on NBC.

“My concern is that we didn’t have enough people on the show,” Olbermann said Monday, according to Michael Hiestand of USA Today.  “We really needed to get that 19th guy.”

But Olbermann is right.  There are too many of them.  Patrick (whom we genuinely like and admire) is now Talking Head No. 7 on the show.

Along with Patrick and Olbermann are Bob Costas, Cris Collinsworth, Peter King, Tiki Barber, and Jerome Bettis.

Last year, NBC reshuffled the format a bit, relegating Barber and Bettis to the kiddie’s table, where the two of them and Collinsworth would provide the former players’ perspective on various issues.  Costas and Collinsworth and Olbermann handled the highlights packages from the Sunday afternoon games, with Peter King chiming in on the results of any information gathering in which he engaged regarding any hot topics that had unfolded as a result of the 1:00 EDT and 4:00 EDT kickoffs.

We like the idea of Patrick and Obermann handling the highlights, but if we were calling the shots (and the shareholders of GE should be glad we aren’t), the show would be only Patrick and Olbermann, and no one else. 

For years, ESPN handled the Sunday night highlights show with only Chris Berman and Tom Jackson.  That’s it.  No frills, just football.

Really, that’s all we care about come 7:00 p.m. on Sunday night.  We want to see extended highlights of the games, and maybe snippets of post-game interviews and press conferences.  We don’t need analysis from guys like Tiki and Jerome; we’ve got the rest of the week for that.  We just want highlights.  Extended highlights.  With narration crafted in the present tense, so that it creates the illusion that the game is still be played as we’re watching the best plays from it. 

We’d probably still have a couple of segments with Peter King, but we’d dump the rest of it and focus on the highlights. 

For Tiki, the loss of his football gig wouldn’t be the end of the road for him at NBC.  He’ll be one of the staffers on “You Might Be Rich!”, a new show that reunites Americans with unclaimed funds that they didn’t realize they owned.

A better title?  “You Might Be Canceled!”

What were we talking about?  Oh yeah.  Give the gig to Patrick and Olbermann, with extended highlights.  And pepper in some Peter King.  And cut the rest of them loose.