My mythical friend from home and I once had the idea of starting a new sports network that would directly challenge ESPN's dominance of the television sports media. We decided to call it "The No Previews No Combine Sports Network."
TNPNCSN is not quite as good an acryonym as ESPN, but our network would surely succeed, attracting all of the sports fans out there who are sick and tired of hearing what Jaws and that skinny guy with glasses think about the NFL draft four months in advance.
ESPN is huge. A quick check of Wikipedia shows 17 ESPN-branded television networks, three radio stations and a really long list of web sites and companies.
ESPN makes books, gives out awards, takes polls, and generally dominates sports coverage in the United States, and, to a certain extent, the world.
And it is terrible.
I used to love ESPN. I vaguely remember waking up before school every morning when I was 12 to watch "SportsCenter." Those were simpler times. The anchors showed the highlights, Stuart Scott made a couple of lame references to pop culture, and everything repeated after an hour.
Compare that to all of the crap you have to sit through now. There has been a gradual shift away from just showing people what happened to telling them what happened. And what is going to happen.
ESPN has become a network of talking heads. Anchors cut away to pre-recorded segments of one of the network's "experts" giving an "analysis" on things like whether Pacman Jones is going to be traded, or whether this will be the year for the Cubs -- it is getting completely out of hand.
Take "Around the Horn" for example. After the success of "Pardon the Interruption," in which two unlikable sports columnists yell at each other for 30 minutes, ESPN decided to up the ante, adding another show in which four unlikable sports columnists yell at each other in order to gain points from the host.
Not the kind of points that valid arguments result in, but the kind of points that sports fans seem to love.
When you watch these shows, your knowledge of sports does not increase at all. At best, you come away with some arguments to repeat to your friends later when they try to tell you that Matt Ryan is going to be the next great quarterback. At worst, you're really, really annoyed.
Halfway through this column, I would like to pause to reflect on the fact that it is really hard to fill 24 hours of sports programming every day.
The Dartmouth has trouble filling up two pages of sports news, so ESPN must have it really bad.
This is not really an excuse for how awful ESPN is, since it has always been running 24 hours, and I am pretty sure it did not always suck so much.
I think Stephen A. Smith is the best example of obnoxious ESPN personalities taking up airtime. Smith's television show, "Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith," bounced around the timeslots on ESPN before crashing and burning shortly after it premiered.
Smith, who signed a multi-million dollar contract with ESPN, has been pulled into the role of obnoxious analyst, making frequent appearances on "SportsCenter" to yell at the camera about the NBA for three minutes at a time.
And my biggest problem with ESPN is last year's coverage of the NFL Combine -- "SportsCenter" wasted at least five minutes every day talking about how NFL hopefuls were doing in the 40 and in the obstacle course.
The only thing I got out of this is that athletes are faster than me. Then some analyst would talk about the NFL draft for five minutes, giving his draft predictions for a slate of college-aged kids he has probably never met.
You might be thinking now that since I don't care at all about the NFL draft, I am not a real sports fan and should change the channel to Jeopardy. You're wrong. I'm a real sports fan because I care about what happens in the games. ESPN used to talk about the final score and how both teams got there. This is what sports fans care about.
Now ESPN has supplemented its coverage with expert opinions about why some team will win next week, or why a certain star player will not return to the NFL when he gets out of jail. None of this should matter to the average sports fan.
Sports are a distraction from the real world. We watch sports to get away from the complications of our daily lives.
When sports coverage makes our daily lives more complicated, injecting stress about who's on steroids and whether a certain high school quarterback will go to Ohio State or Michigan, it has missed the point.
I long for the glory days of ESPN. I want highlights and funny commercials, not analysis given by annoying talking heads. I want sports.
