The Day I Realized I Could Work For ESPN

ESPN's new extreme sports analyst

The Great Harv brought this to my attention. If you will notice on the right side of the link (if you scroll down a bit), not one of the 10 ESPN experts picked the Magic to beat the Cavs. Not one! Did any of them bother to look at the numbers? Did Jalen Rose find it suspicious that, before the series, the Magic had beaten the Cavs 10 of the last 14 times they played? Or that the Cavs suck against the elite teams in the NBA this year (3-6)? In fact, this series could have been 4-0 except for two Herculean efforts by LeBron.

It got me to thinking. . . what does it take to be an “expert” for ESPN? We could extrapolate from this to ask what it takes (a PhD? a pretty face? street smarts? local knowledge?) to be an “expert” on anything in our media landscape, but, for now, let’s stick to ESPN. This post is, in a sense, an extension of Ground Possum’s lemon harangue pie he hit CBS Sports’ Mike Freeman with in the face the other day.

The first question I want to ask is, does it matter if all their experts couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a machine gun? Certainly, CNBC’s infotainment financial shows that hype finance/markets in the same way ESPN hypes sports/superstars are worse, since people are dumb enough to invest their fortunes on Jim Kramer’s advice. The worst thing that ESPN experts could do to me is fuck up my Fantasy Football draft order if I followed their seemingly random computer-generated Top 100.

Chris Berman (with leather) crunching the numbers

Still, something about their lack of depth and cavalier style sticks in my maw. I get it, we all get it, ESPN is about promotion and entertainment. There is nothing hidden or covert about their existence and what they do. Still, shouldn’t they have someone that you can reasonably trust? I’m not asking that person to be right all the time (who could be?), but I am asking them to have some good reasons for making the picks they make (other than a sound bite) or why they analyze something in a certain way.

Experts must serve some function, since there are a million experts/columnists/analysts on ESPN. Go ahead, sort through them, I will wait. . . It can’t all be hot air and promotion, can it? Someone, at some point, has had to say something intelligent and over 30 seconds on ESPN. Bob Ley?

Most ESPN expert/analysts don’t have to worry about being wrong. They can either work their ineptness into their crazy shtick or rely on the fact that the 24 hour news cycle moves so fast that it actually takes work to piece together their far-flung, contradictory claims. Or most people don’t care and realize ESPN is just for entertainment.

Whatever the case, it is occasionally fun to point out how wrong the pearly white teeth of ESPN can be. And, if they are this dumb, doesn’t that make all of us experts too?

Erin Andrews is not sure if she likes this post or not.

Let’s Get Trivial: Trends in Punctuation

I returned last week from a trip out of the country to see that ESPN has made a subtle change to its crawl. Under the MLB heading, amidst the scores and stats, a brief factoid on the new allegations about Alex Rodriguez read something like this (not verbatim):

New book alleges Rodriguez not only loves his pony, but also loves his pony.

This was followed by a related note of some sort (again, not verbatim):

Teammates mum on Rodriguez allegations; “fuck that guy” says rest of league.

See that? See what they did? Nary a week prior these sentences would have been sans end punctuation, mere clauses left adrift in an illegible sea of letters and numbers. But suddenly, as if handed down from some sacred mount of excess punctuation, periods appear to separate the clauses and lend a sense of, well, what? Most of these clauses aren’t even complete sentences! Why are these periods here when we had all been fine without them? Was there some hue and cry over the lack of end punctuation on ESPN news notices? Can we expect question marks as well, or even exclamation points? I can see it now:

Joe Buck finally put to death!

Travis seems to think that this emergence of the period is merely the result of a new editor on the crawl. But can things really be so simple? Would ESPN make such a radical change without accounting for their audience(s)? What might we make of this? I must confess that I love the periods—they have a certain, I shit you not, elegance to them; they almost seem like a design element more than a mere punctuation mark, and their terseness, I again shit you not, kind of reminds me of Beckett. More likely, though, the periods are a move against the informality of social networking websites. Consider this: over the past several months, Facebook has made significant changes not only to its layout, but also to the auto-formatting of its status updates. Since November, Facebook has dropped both the automatic “is” at the beginning of updates as well as the automatic period at the end of otherwise-unpunctuated updates. Both of these changes are part of Facebook’s larger move toward emulating Twitter, which limits “tweets” to 140 characters, a format which bears striking similarity to . . . ESPN crawl updates!* Thus, while web-based social networking becomes less and less formal, the information crawl of a cable sports network increases in formality. Rather than succumb to the haphazard spelling and punctuations, the internet slang, and the utter trivialities of posts on such sites, the ESPN crawl editors are moving the other way, establishing greater formality and thus a greater sense of significance.

In other words, “Yes, Ken Griffey’s inflamed colon is a weighty, weighty matter that cannot be dismissed without the serious consideration demanded by a period. Which is completely different than your friend’s pointless tweet about the new periods on the ESPN crawl.”

Erin Andrews.

* And, more generally, the crawls of cable news channels, text messages, and internet chat messages

An Open Letter to ESPN

Closed, as in, not open for business.

Dear ESPN,

What the fuck? I am writing to you as a concerned citizen of cyberworld who wants to ask: why did you take away Fantasy Golf this year? Was your design so good that it was crushing any PGA-related sites and, via some backroom deals, got shut down?

You do realize that all the other Fantasy Golf sites suck really hard, don’t you? They don’t have the sophisticated birdie scoring system, the fear of missing the cut that you instill, or the hook to make you check it every day. What vested interest do I have in a Fantasy Golf set up that only needs to be checked on Sunday (to see the final placement of this or that rich dude)?

If I may be so bold, may I ask whether Fantasy Golf was profitable or not? It would seem that targeting old money white dudes and/or nouveau riche hillbillies who loves trucks and golf (and three poor grad students) is something you would want to do. I cannot fathom how there is not just a little bit of money in it for you. Don’t people into golf constant buy shit to improve their game? Can’t you find a few advertisers to make it worth your while?

This guy celebrates at this or that tournament.

I am sorry if I come off as intemperate, I simply don’t know what to do with myself on Thursdays and Fridays. Sure, the weekend is a bustling time, but what am I to do with myself on Thursday if I cannot constant check ESPN to see if Johnson Wagner birdied the 5th hole or if Andres Romero can get up and down on 17? The way I see it, you had me at Mayakoba Classic, why are you trying to break my heart?

Also, double what the fuck: you have a Stock Car Challenge and a Fantasy Fishing Challenge??? You have to be kidding me. What does the Fantasy Fishing Challenge even entail? I don’t want to debate whether fishing is a sport or not (it’s not), but I do want to debate how Fantasy Fishing gets the free pass and Fantasy Golf gets cut from your lineup? I can only guess that the upkeep on the Fantasy Fishing site is less time/worker intensive: Uhh, okay I think this dillweed will catch an X lb. fish. Okay done.

Celebrating a weekly victory in BOTH the Stock Car and Fishing Challenge

All I ask is that you please reconsider in 2010.

regards,
Doc Hollywood

Don’t Worry About It

If he stays healthy, I see the Suns going deep all up in the Playoffs. . .