Another once great cable network is wallowing in self-parody.
Lebron gets a lot of the blame for this summer's awful "Decision" spectacle, but ESPN is more guilty for its role in the hype.
This weekend, during a college football game, the announcers did a segment where they talked about how the big 3 in Miami would fare in football, all while a graphic on the screen showed each of the guy's vital stats.
Why would anyone watching the game on TV care about this pointless hypothetical scenario? The audience for this game was most likely either gamblers or graduates of whatever schools were featured. I swear to you, and this is not a cop out, I was flipping channels and stumbled upon this during my flippage. I thought it might have been a Heat preseason game when I saw the graphic on the screen.
ESPN has become a sleazy greedy promotion machine, whereas it used to be the total sports network.
Ugh, 2010.
3 comments:
I feel the polar opposite. I think of all the television stations ESPN has prided themselves on experimenting with formatting and abstracting the generally rote material they have to work with, all while keeping active independent dissent to popular contemporary opinions.
They do lots of hokey stuff, but a lot of the time the tone is directly tongue in cheek. Considering they have to caterer to the lowest common denominator, one which is even lower than the other basic cable's standards, they still constantly circulate intelligent programming and good sports broadcasting.
I agree with you about ESPN's quality.
It's really just their handling of Lebron that has been completely out of character for them.
Well is it even slightly absurd to assume that any basic cable station is prone to a total media buyout? The off table wine and dining shit for Bosh and Lebron must have cost a fortune unto itself that they had to recoup in preseason ticket sales and preorders of jerseys and whatever AIDS infest BS they could shovel out the door of the sweatshops or whatever.
Beyond that, Lebron obviously left the Cavs with bad blood and as far as I'm concerned, he doesn't have the personality or tact of a lot of his rivals (which is ironic to see people go King James while Tim Duncan has 4 rings which were essentially mostly his own) and he chose pretty actively to do some two-dimensional hype factory. I think they're trying to give Miami a "renegade" image because they conceived signing few other worthwhile players.
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