News broke earlier today that after three years, Tony Kornheiser will step down from his spot in the Monday Night Football booth due to his fear of flying.

He'll be replaced by, of all people, Jon Gruden. Chucky joins Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski to give us one of the most interesting booths of all time.

It'll be an interesting change to have a former NFL quarterback, a very-recently-turned former NFL head coach, and one of the better play-by-play guys in football in Mike Tirico. The most interesting interchanges should be between Jaworski and Gruden, especially given their personalities.

Jaworski, I feel, has been one of the best at explaining the Xs and Os to normal football fans since John Madden. You can say what  you want about Madden, but he was among the first to explain the subtle strategy changes that take place throughout a game. Not the greatest coach, he made high-level football strategy a common talking point over nachos and beer -- not an accomplishment you should overlook.

He had a schtick that was easily lampooned, though. Jaworski does not, which, given how sophisticated the average football fan has become about the league, is a welcome change. Jaworski will, however, now have somebody with real football chops in the booth to exchange talking points about. Hopefully, we'll even see some differences in opinion.

Jaworski is an incredibly nice guy on TV (I assume he's about the same off screen but I've never met him) and even when Tirico or Kornheiser made a point that didn't fly, Jaworski only gentle corrected him. Gruden, however, is going to stick to his guns (although he'll make far more defensible points that have to do with actual football.) and I wonder if Ron will defer to Gruden a bit.

Either way, it is the end of Tony Kornheiser on MNF, whether it's for the reasons he states or not. Regardless, I think it could be an improvement in the booth. While Tony always tried hard, his points weren't always salient. He's a great writer and a good sports mind, but his abilities lend themselves to seeing the big picture when all the evidence is in front of him.

As a writer, we're always watching games with an idea as to how the story is going to play out. Most of us will writer our game stories as it goes on and just make minor changes as the final minutes or outs play out. Every three-up, three-down inning by a great pitcher is the beginning of a historic 18-k performance, every time a team down 15 points goes on a 6-0 run it's the beginning of a huge comeback, and every bench guy who goes off for 12 points in the first quarter is going to drop 48 on the opposition. We're just wired that way.

When you take that mentality of trying to get ahead of the game to the booth and make a person say it out loud, it just sounds ridiculous most of the time. When we're wrong about those great stories and the game turns out to be pretty pedestrian (as it usually does), there's no delete key in the booth. Tony works on Pardon the Interruption because the game is already played out, he knows what happened and can then react to it, with the facts in front of him. It's just a different game.

I don't think he'll rank anywhere near the worst guys in the booth, but I don't think he ever really rose that high out of the middle of the pack as he was expected to. He may be the best cable sports show co-host ever, but as a booth guy, it just didn't work.

Now we have Gruden, who should be decent and could be exceptional. We've seen the MNF booth, since going back to ABC/ESPN, develop slowly and work out the kinks. The desire to return to the days of Howard Cosell was probably misguided, but now we have a football booth for a football-watching population that wants to watch and hear about, you know, football.

I think they may finally get it.