I was going to shoehorn this into the previous post, but that one was way too long already, so I'm doing it here. Over the weekend I traded a few mails with a site reader and fellow football fan, who first turned me on to Football Outsiders a couple of years ago. We started talking about the endless Atlanta-madness forum thread there, (discussed at the bottom of the previous post) then digressed to sports coverage in general. A quote from his mail:
It's not just Atlanta fans, though. Colin Cowherd of ESPN radio was gushing about Michael Vick and his win/loss record, and how it's not fair to penalize him for his subpar passing stats. How did he justify this? He pulled out some numbers for Joe Namath. Which is like me saying that Roger Clemens isn't a very good pitcher since he doesn't have nearly as many wins as Cy Young. (Hello, Colin...different eras? Different rules. Anybody in there?) So I'm done listening to him-it's not the first completely stupid thing he's said.
Vick is exciting so people seem to line up to promote him. Like you have pointed out before, though, he is very difficult to analyze with statistics because of how different he is from other QBs. My question, which you have alluded to, is how good could Atlanta be if they scrapped the stupid West Coast Offense and went more to a boom-or-bust long passing game that showcases Vick's arm? Oh, for full disclosure I've mostly rooted against Vick since ESPN hyped him so much when he was in college and took away attention from my favorite Purdue player at the time, Drew Brees. (Heck, Brees had nearly as many rushing yards as Vick did in 2000. Something like 630 to 510.)
Maybe it's just the rise of the Internet, but I am getting to the point where just ignore ANYthing in the mainstream media. How can you trust it? ESPN might as well launch ESPN TO -- all Terrell Owens, all the time. Just go ahead and pander to the lowest common denominator. Bartolo Colon wins the Cy Young Award? Really? How is that possible?
I agreed, except for the Bartolo Colon part, since I had no idea who that was, or even that this year's Cy Young Award had already been announced. Fortunately, a quick look at ESPN.com found me
some relevant info, and shockingly enough, it was even free to look at, on that increasingly-Insider™ only bastion of sports writing. (Nutshell; Colon had more wins, but another pitcher, Johan Santana, was much better in everything else, but didn't have as many wins because his team scored far fewer runs. Sportswriters are old school and stupid and vote based on stats that aren't very useful, like wins rather than ERA, K/BB ratio, etc.)
As for espn and sports radio... yeah. I'm lucky enough to say I've never listened to sports talk radio, aside from a few callers on various post-game Padres broadcasts in the old days, and they were uniformly uninforming. I don't watch sportscenter very often, and when I do it's almost always on weekends, when I want to see college and pro football highlights. Even those are largely unwatchable, especially the college ones, as they spend 50% of the show "debating" and postmortuming whatever their lead game was. Last weekend they showed Miami@Virginia Tech, a game I didn't see and one that was apparently completely boring and one-sided, but that didn't stop them from cutting back to Lee Corso and the other idiots sitting outside, in the dark, with an empty parking lot backdrop, as they endlessly "analyzed" the game with a thimble-deep level of insight. Simply unwatchable, IMHO.
The Sunday highlights are better since while Chris Berman and the other guy are equally-unlistenable, they're very skippable, when taped. Since the highlights always start right after a commercial, end a minute later, and lead into 4 or 5 minutes of "analysis," it's easy FF through the truck and beer commercials, watch the highlights, and then click FF again for the useless talking and more truck and beer commercials. Someday we'll have a digital VCR, or Tivo or whatever surplants it, and such manipulations will be meaningless. But for now, using our old VCR that lacks the ability to FF or RW less than 30 seconds at a time, I give thanks for ESPN's format.
Their programming though, is another issue. Highlights usually take a back seat to unenlightened "analysis," they show, at most, 1/10 of the good plays from a given game, and they focus far too much on individual heroics while giving virtually no insight into the actual flow of the game or the key, non-scoring plays. Sports, at least on ESPN, has become tabloid journalism, with nothing but controversy (a large percentage of which they start and flame themselves) and discord, and they've become convinced that no one just wants to watch the plays; they've got to spice up the highlights with bad music, chattering voice overs, or painful editing. And if there's a worse innovation (other than the unwatchable "ultimate highlight" sequences) than zooming in on the screen to cut off the logo off the other networks from the corners, I can't imagine what it might be. It's like some sort of glaucoma-simulation, where suddenly the center of the screen is twice its normal size, and the edges are blurry and pixelated. All just to avoid showing the FOX or CBS or whoever's logo? As if viewers are somehow unaware that those channels broadcast the game in question in the first place?
I desperately wish Fox Sports or some other cable channel would start running their own version of SportsCenter. An hour a night, just a ton of highlights, and no idiot anchors or ex-jocks babbling over them. Everyone has to watch SportsCenter now, no matter how much it sucks since there's nothing competing against it. What's the option; three minutes of highlights at the end of your local news with maybe 30 seconds of actual highlights?
The highlights are bad enough, but sadder yet is the person who actually watches ESPN for sporting info. I remember back before the Internet, when all we had were games on weekends, highlights on the local channels and ESPN, and some homer-centric articles in the paper, with a few charts showing the NFL teams ranked by total yards allowed or gained, or other basically-useless stats like that. Nowadays, with vastly-superior sources of info all over the Internet, including all over their own website, it's odd how steadfastly ESPN clings to conventional wisdom and old school "attitude, heart, guts, team chemistry, and swagger" bullshit from their talking heads. Given how dumb and useless I find those guys, I'm probably quite happy not listening to any of the sports radio the emailer mentioned. I'd put my ears out.
