By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, November 17, 2008 3:00 PM

If it wasn't Romo, Romo, Romo on NBC's Football Night in America on Sunday, it was promo, promo, promo as the Redskins lost their second straight home game in front of a prime-time national television audience.

Of course, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo's busted right pinkie was the main story line of the night, but after a while, there were only so many ways the broadcasters could say he was wearing a splint on his hand and it was probably going to have some effect on how he would throw and hand off the football.

My own choke point came in the second half, when John Madden put on a similar splint -- size XXXXL, no doubt -- and went off on a typical Madden riff that added nothing more to the discussion. And as the game wore on, it also became increasingly obvious that Romo was having little difficulty throwing the ball exactly where he wanted, including a 25-yard touchdown pass early in the fourth quarter that eventually doomed the home team.

The Redskins also came into the game with an injury to one of their best players. But far less time in the booth was devoted to Washington running back Clinton Portis's wounded knee.

It might have helped to show a diagram of the knee joint showing exactly what the problem was and how it might affect his ability to run and cut. Where was the pregame interview with Portis to talk about his state of mind, like the chat sideline reporter Andrea Kremer had with Romo a few minutes before kickoff?

Why not try to get a trainer or team doctor on camera to describe what Portis had to go through over the last two weeks to get ready to run, and whether he was risking further serious injury by playing? (They could have that for Romo's injury, as well.)

And why was there no taped footage from that critical 15-minute pregame warmup, held 2 1/2 hours before kickoff and watched closely by Redskins coaches and medical men? Madden said at the start of the game that Portis "looked real good in the pregame warmups," but why not let viewers decide for themselves?

All of this is not to say that NBC's Sunday night football extravaganza is not without great merit. As long as you've got Madden and Al Michaels in the booth, you're going to get the most entertaining two-man pro football announcing team on television. And sideline reporter Kremer, arguably now the best in the business in a very tough job, always asks all the right questions and offers newsy nuggets whenever she gets a chance.

The production crew headed by veteran producer Michael Weisman covers games from all available angles, with multiple replay views on every critical play. My own personal preference would be to eliminate the clichéd shots of politically incorrect Chief Zee and the camera-hogging Hogettes in the stands, not to mention not always pointing a camera toward the owner's boxes to watch Jerry Jones stand there and fret, or Daniel Snyder sit there and scowl (a perfectly understandable look considering his team was unraveling down below).

Those shots are now all standard procedure for every network, but used to be a lot more fun back in the day at RFK Stadium, when the late Jack Kent Cooke and all the sparklies in his owner's box loved having their mugs on national television.

But back to the present.

Madden has plenty of critics out there carping that he's lost his fastball, and there are times when he really does state the obvious. At one point, he said of the Cowboys, "if you're going to be a championship team, you have to play like a championship team." So who didn't know that?

But his best work of the night came in the final minutes, right before the Cowboys' last possession of the game. Dallas had a four-point lead, and Washington was desperate to get the ball back for a possible game-winning drive.

"This is a Marion Barber situation," Madden said simply, and quite presciently, of the Cowboys battering back, knowing full well that Dallas was about to put the ball in Barber's hands and let him churn up the yards and the clock for as long as possible.

Of course, that's exactly what happened, with Barber handling the ball on 11 straight plays, catching one pass to pick up a critical first down on a third-and-seven situation, then icing the game on fourth and two with his final first-down run of the night. From there, Romo took a knee and ran out the clock, and that "Barber situation" Madden had predicted unfolded exactly as he said it would.

Avid followers of the Cowboys might complain that Madden again was stating the obvious. But the Sunday night audience also is filled with countless casual fans of the game who may not have been quite so familiar with Barber and his fourth-quarter heroics.

And now, we interrupt this column for the promo portion of the Sunday night show.

There are many reasons networks are willing to pay billions for NFL programming, and one of the main ones is the opportunity to introduce viewers to upcoming shows on those very same networks.

And so, during every commercial break, in addition to the car and beer ads -- including about-to-go-bankrupt General Motors telling viewers the company can still provide "financing that fits" -- the audience was exposed to a barrage of previews of shows available this week on NBC's schedule. If you didn't already know it, his name is Earl and he's on NBC.

At halftime, they got Meredith Vieira on camera live from Australia to plug the Today show's "Ends of The Earth" programming this week, focusing on the planet's dwindling water supply. What that had to do with the football game remains to be seen, unless players were not allowed to shower afterward, but it was a halftime feature that Al Gore surely would have applauded.

Before the start of the third quarter, viewers also saw a much-ballyhooed video of Bruce Springsteen's new football-themed song, "Working On a Dream," yet another promo for NBC being the network of the Super Bowl this year. Springsteen, of course, will be performing at halftime from Tampa in February.

Stay tuned. To NBC. That's the whole Romo/promo idea.

The sports talk radio station ESPN980 bills Frank Hanrahan as its "Redskins reporter" and stations him out at Redskins Park to provide constant updates on the news of the day. Hanrahan does a decent job in that role as a member of the working media covering the team, but he also has been assigned to serve as the host for the still dreadful Vinny Cerrato show on the same station twice a week. That's a very bad idea.

If Hanrahan is truly the station's Redskins' beat reporter, he's got no business hosting a show featuring the team's executive vice president four hours a week on a station that also is owned by Daniel Snyder.

You think Hanrahan is in any position to ask Cerrato the really tough questions, grill him the way he might be grilled by a reporter from another media outlet covering the team? And if he did challenge Cerrato, question some of his decisions, second-guess his personnel moves, how long do you think he'd keep his job as the beat reporter, let alone hosting Cerrato's show?

To its credit, station management so far has not prevented its hosts from criticizing the Redskins. But Hanrahan clearly does not have that same freedom, and his role as host of Cerrato's show really does compromise his credibility as a beat reporter. He probably has no choice in the matter, but the station would be wise to make a change.

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at Len.Shapiro@was hingtonpost.com