Scott Van Pelt chose unfortunate wording when asking Jason Kelce about the Cowboys. When it comes to working with center-turned-commentator Jason Kelce, ESPN’s Marcus Spears probably has it right. 

If you’re going to ask Kelce a question, you’d better be careful how you word it. So when, on “Monday Night Countdown,” anchor Scott Van Pelt posed a question to Kelce with double entendres, Spears had a reasonable reaction.

“You did not have to ask that question like that,” Spears said, in a video posted by Awful Announcing.

Van Pelt and the crew were talking about the Cowboys’ inability to stop the run in Weeks 2 and 3. Dallas’ defense was gashed first by the Saints and star Alvin Kamara (190 total rushing yards allowed), then by Derrick Henry and the Ravens (274 yards).

Van Pelt made the mistake of phrasing his question this way: “Jason, when you start pushing them, when you start pushing them and they can’t stop you, that has to be the best feeling there is.”

Spears registered his objection, but Kelce responded: “There’s nothing more I love than pushing it on another grown man and just taking it over!”

The rest of the “MNC” gang sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment after that as Kelce tried to turn things serious again.

As Kelce wrote on Twitter/X on Tuesday, it’s hardly his fault. “I mean what was I supposed to do when Scott sets me up like this!” he posted.

Eventually, Kelce pulled together his maturity and gave a straight answer on the Cowboys’ run-defense woes.

“There is no greater feeling than when you’re taking over the line of scrimmage as an offensive lineman,” Kelce said. “When you’re dominating the line of scrimmage, at will, Baltimore is multi-faceted, it ain’t like it’s a simple thing to stop. They got Lamar and they got Derrick Henry. What they faced last week, Kamara, they couldn’t stop that, either.

“They’ve got to get something fixed; they’ve got to figure it out.”