Frank Shamrock will replace Bill Goldberg in the EliteXC broadcast booth, at least for the promotion’s 5/31 debut on CBS. No indication of this being due to an issue with Goldberg, as the promotion is also replacing Steven Quadros with veteran CBS sportscaster Gus Johnson. Mauro Ranallo, who’s well known to MMA fans and considered by most to be a solid broadcaster, will be the third man in the booth. Karyn Bryant, who works with Showtime Boxing, will be doing locker room interviews–basically the same role as a ’sideline reporter’ in the NFL.

On balance, this looks like a good decision all around. You know that both Johnson and Ranallo are solid pros, but Shamrock could surprise a lot of people. He’s got an underrated sense of humor and is very intelligent and well spoken when he’s not trying to do a pro wrestling style “heel persona” to hype fights. And clearly he knows the sport front and back. While he’s not had any significant experience in this type of role he’s smart enough to follow the lead of the two pros in the booth.

Bill Goldberg will likely remain in his expert commentator role on the Showtime broadcasts. He’s a big fan of MMA and though he’s not a particularly smooth broadcaster he’s enthusiastic in his commentary and well known the the sport’s core demographic.

The press release issued by CBS has some unintentionally funny lines–this is from the AP article on the Shamrock announcement which appears to have been written verbatim from it:

Frank Shamrock, a five-time Ultimate Fighting champion and perhaps the biggest name in the sport, will serve as an analyst and color commentator for the inaugural “CBS Elitexc Saturday Night Fights.”

The telecast will be anchored by CBS veteran play-by-play man Gus Johnson, a practicing martial artist and mainstay for the network’s college basketball, NBA and NFL games. He’ll be joined by Mauro Ranallo, who hosts Showtime’s mixed martial arts programming, and Showtime boxing reporter Karyn Bryant.

“The expertise and knowledge of this diverse cast of announcers will not only excite and inform the hardcore fan, but will educate and entertain people tuning in to watch mixed martial arts for the very first time,” said Douglas DeLuca, executive chairman of ProElite, which produces the Elitexc fights in partnership with Showtime.

Shamrock, a pioneer of full-contact cage fighting and the first UFC middleweight champion, has beaten some of the sport’s biggest names, including Tito Ortiz, Bas Rutten, Enson Inoue, Jeremy Horn and Phil Baroni. He once had a guest-starring role on “Walker, Texas Ranger” and is the younger brother of mixed martial arts fighter and former professional wrestler Ken Shamrock.

The CBS event will be broadcast live May 31 from the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., at 9 p.m. EDT.

Fox-owned MyNetwork TV was the first network to air mixed-martial arts live with an International Fight League event in November of last year.

In the first line they give Zuffa some free press by referring to the sport as ‘ultimate fighting’. It’ll be interesting to see if they get the usual “ultimate fighting is a registered trademark of Zuffa, LLC” lawyer letter that everyone else gets. At the same time they refer to Shamrock as a ‘five time Ultimate Fighting champion”. Maybe they mean he won the title and then defended it four times, but that’s one win and four successful defenses–it doesn’t make him a “five time champion”. Shamrock is, however, is arguably a legit five time MMA champion having won the UFC middleweight title which was later renamed the ‘light heavyweight title’ –whether this is one or two titles is debatable–along with the King of Pancrase title, WEC light heavyweight title and the STRIKEFORCE middleweight title. This isn’t to suggest that Shamrock isn’t a legitimate legend, and no matter how you count up his titles he’s got a highly impressive resume. Still, the general idea of a press release is to clarify this kind of information and CBS does just the opposite.

The next line is the most ridiculous:

“perhaps the biggest name in the sport”

Again, with all due respect to Shamrock he probably doesn’t crack the top ten of ‘biggest names in the sport’. Clearly, the exact composition of this list would depend on the metric used but he’s not even the ‘biggest name’ in his own promotion. Kimbo Slice and Gina Carano would certainly rank above Shamrock in terms of name recognition, and particularly with the ‘new breed’ of MMA fans. This would be like describing Luis Collazo as ‘perhaps the biggest name in boxing’–he’s a first rate fighter but obviously lags behind a number of other fighters in terms of name recognition and mainstream popularity. Why this line was even necessary to include with Shamrock’s numerous other credentials is a head scratcher as it won’t mean anything to the mainstream public and any serious MMA fan would immediately call it into question. The press release also throws in the term ‘cage fighting’ for good measure, though at least they don’t call it ‘no holds barred cage fighting’.

This may all seem a bit ‘nitpicky’ but these minor details are an important part of changing the way the media and mainstream public views the sport. If EliteXC can’t count on their own network to get the terminology and facts about their promotion and the sport right there’s an obvious problem there.

They do get points for throwing in what seems like a non sequitur:

“Fox-owned MyNetwork TV was the first network to air mixed-martial arts live with an International Fight League event in November of last year.”

This is likely a subtle jab at the sanctimonious quote by the FoxSports honcho who was trying to curry favor with Viacom bigwig Sumner Redstone when he said that his network ‘didn’t need money badly enough’ to carry MMA. The punch line there is that in addition to the MyNetwork TV instance listed above FoxSportsNet has carried both the IFL and PRIDE.

It could also be something of a “CYA” statement to pre-empt criticism that CBS is somehow setting a bad precedent by broadcasting MMA–this line suggests that they’re only following the lead of another network.

Even this line isn’t technically correct–if you inserted the modifier ‘broadcast’ before ‘network’ it might be correct. As its written, it suggests that everyone who’s watched any number of live UFC events on SPIKE-TV were hallucinating. If you include premium networks like Showtime–where a number of EliteXC events have aired live–its even less correct.

Shamrock to be analyist on network MMA broadcast @ Associated Press

UPDATE: Dave Meltzer at The Wrestling Observer addressed this issue today. He’s likely as an authoritative source as you’ll find on the subject of title reigns and by his scorecard Shamrock would be a one time UFC champion who defended that title four times.