What is ESPN thinking?

Prove it.

 

I lack empirical data, admittedly...

 

I suppose Roving Gambler is probably right: They do think. They're smart enough to realize that reducing Sports Center to the lowest common denominator is the best way to draw in viewers. Things like a misspelled name produce more interest from the dumb crowd than how a top-25 Big 12 men's basketball game actually played out. It's why I refuse to sit through Sports Center, and I'm not alone.

 

I admit that I do find myself tuning out SportsCenter these days, but targeting the niche programming in sports I'm interested in. I'll look for College Basketball Final (or whatever it's called) because they generally do a decent job. Same with college football, basketball, baseball and the NFL. I don't like that they took their Sunday NFL show and sort of merged it into sports center (The Blitz).

Sports Center does seem a bit more low brow now. But I do think that reaches a larger audience and the sport-specific shows cater to fans more sophisticated. At least, that's how it appears at a cursory glance.

 

ESPN News used to be great - you got all of the nuts and bolts of SC w/o the filler and fluff - Highlight Express is okay, and I guess you can figure out what is going on off the field with the bottom line - but I still wish they did a half-hour version.

 

Ditto for me...the half-hour or hour I used to automatically go to ESPN for the daily highlights, I now spend online or preferably finding a late-night West Coast game somewhere.

 

About the same time it stopped playing football ... or at least football worth a damn.

 

What is this ESPN of which you speak?

 

This sounds just like the call I took from a whining parent last night. Are you going to complain that A&M works just as hard as Duke and deserves the same amount of coverage next?

Sweet Tebow, I don't like ESPN as much as the next guy, but this is about 5 million on the list of things that need to change before I watch the station for a significant amount of time.

 

Sounds like the same arc of Headline News — both have been ruined for me.

 

If that ESPN highlight had been a newspaper article written in a similar fashion, your office would be deluged with calls from both sides. A&M fans would bitch about how the story didn't say anything about how A&M won the game. K-State fans would call to beat you down for picking on a kid whose contribuition to the game appeared to be minimal, according to the box score.

The ESPN highlight reel didn't show me anything about how the game was won or lost until almost at the end. Just because it's ESPN and just because it has "5 million" other things to improve on doesn't excuse that it was utter crap.

 

I think the point is the Sportscenter highlights didn't tell us anything relevant about the game. They saw an opportunity to make fun of the kid and wasted time doing that instead of explaining how/why A&M won.