Former NFL wide receiver Braylon Edwards is at NFL Films in New Jersey taking part in the NFL Player Engagement’s Broadcast Boot Camp and snapped this picture during a seminar. It tidily sums up everything you’ve known about sports broadcasts and television in general: broadcast companies think you are idiots and specifically train their talent to tailor their work to that low bar.

There is allegedly science behind this Dan Dierdorf assembly line, as you can clearly tell by the percent signs and a footnote attributing them to work done by a UCLA communications professor. It also conforms to a little bit of common sense we all share: first impressions and appearances matter. If you look like Leisure Suit Larry up there, you are probably not going to find a receptive audience, no matter what you say. But we also know that this common sense comes with a caveat—at the very least, total reliance on superficial impressions is a bad idea. Moby Dick isn’t a bad book just because it has a stupid whale on the cover and Wild Scottish Embrace isn’t a great book just because of Fabio’s hunky pecs.

Maybe the next slide in the presentation was more optimistic, maybe it told them all to forget about those stats, but it’s hard not to look at and listen to the product on Sunday afternoons and feel like they aren’t selling us all short. You look at something like “It’s hardly about what you say!” and “7% the words that are spoken” and you begin to understand how Phil Simms is one half of CBS’s A-Team. Or how every single ex-ballplayer says “The National Football League” or “dominating the line of scrimmage” like they get paid by the syllable and get performance bonuses for the bass level.

It might not be the most important topic—we are very much here for the games and not for the things said about the games—but it would be nice, for those of us who are curious, to gain further insight into the game. That’s the entire premise for a color commentator. They’ve been there before and know what it’s really like. In reality, what we get, with few exceptions, is stuff like “that’s just good old-fashioned smashmouth football” instead of an explanation for what we just saw on the field and why it worked (or didn’t).

We’ve been able to infer for a long time that the league as a whole has a pretty contemptuous opinion of its audience—whether it is the NFL’s longstanding and preposterous stance on head injuries and player safety, the reckless administration of justice only after public outcry, or Thursday Night Football—but rarely has that contempt been crystallized into one perfect PowerPoint slide.